From the exhibition
Dolly the Drummer
· September 6, 1925
Fred Morgan's *Dolly the Drummer* appeared in Sunday newspapers as a full-page color feature, combining comedy and film-world satire. The strip follows Dolly and her companions through Hollywood mishaps: here, an amateur camera operator and a starlet's beach-movie scheme lead to slapstick chaos when a monkey disrupts the shoot. The nine-panel grid structure—now standard in newspaper comics—uses sequential panels, speech balloons, and sight gags to propel narrative action. Morgan employs dynamic car chases and physical comedy typical of 1920s silent-film aesthetics. Such Sunday strips, appearing alongside daily continuities, formed the visual foundation of the emerging comic book form, establishing conventions of panel layout, character recurrence, and comedic pacing that would define the medium.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain
