ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Boys Will Be Boys

· November 21, 1909

Boys Will Be Boys
This Sunday newspaper strip follows a group of boys through a series of escalating pranks and chases. The narrative unfolds across nine panels, using speech balloons and sequential action to propel readers through the gags: a dare to run fast, a pursuit by an adult, wild flight through a landscape, and a final confrontation with a hare. The artist employs exaggerated anatomy and dynamic linework typical of early 1900s comic illustration. By this period, the Sunday newspaper comic had become a standardized feature, with artists developing visual shortcuts—motion lines, expressive faces, panel borders—that would define comic book grammar for decades to come. Strips like this one established the vocabulary of sequential art that transformed how stories were told in print.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain