From the exhibition
Curses! The Chee-Ild Is in the Safe with Buck Nix's Millions
· September 2, 1911
A Sunday strip by Sidney Smith featuring the character Buck Nix in a home-invasion melodrama. The narrative unfolds across six panels: a burglar enters seeking millions locked in a safe, discovers a child inside the vault, and chaos ensues as adult characters react with exaggerated alarm. Smith's economical linework and sequential panel layout—speech balloons anchoring dialogue, action poses driving plot momentum—exemplify the visual vocabulary that newspaper comics inherited from earlier sequential art and refined into a mass medium. By 1911, the Sunday comics page was America's dominant form of narrative illustration, reaching millions of readers and establishing conventions of character, humor, and pacing that would define the coming comic book industry.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain
