ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

The Adventures of Kitty Cobb

· 1912

The Adventures of Kitty Cobb
James Montgomery Flagg's *Kitty Cobb* appeared as a serial narrative told through pictures in American newspapers. This installment, "Palm Reading," depicts a fortune teller's encounter with the titular character—a young woman whose story unfolds across multiple panels with text beneath each image. Flagg's pen-and-ink style employs bold cross-hatching and expressive linework to convey setting and emotion. The strip exemplifies the Sunday page format that emerged in the 1890s, where sequential panels and recurring characters provided serialized entertainment. These newspaper strips, drawn by artists developing visual conventions of panel layout and captioning, established the formal vocabulary that would define comic books decades later.

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