From the exhibition
The Cop Saves Brainy Bowers' Brains From Becoming Stagnant
· March 6, 1904

This six-panel Sunday strip follows a cop's encounter with the mischievous Brainy Bowers, whose energetic antics threaten public order. The narrative unfolds through sequential panels connected by action and dialogue balloons, demonstrating the visual conventions that newspaper comics were standardizing in the early 1900s. The artist employs exaggerated character design and physical comedy to drive the humor across the page. Newspaper Sunday pages like this were the direct precursors to the comic book format, establishing the panel-based storytelling, recurring characters, and speech balloon techniques that would define sequential art for generations.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain