ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Fluffy Ruffles

· Early 1900s

Fluffy Ruffles
Drawn by Wallace Morgan, *Fluffy Ruffles* followed a young girl's misadventures through city streets and society. This Sunday page demonstrates the visual vocabulary newspapers had adopted by the 1900s: multiple panels arranged in narrative sequence, speech balloons carrying dialogue, and recurring characters positioned within dynamic urban settings. The strip's episodic structure—Fluffy lost in the slums, then sought by concerned adults, finally discovered—shows how artists compressed plot across discrete frames. Morgan's line work captures period clothing and architecture while moving readers from scene to scene. Such strips, appearing weekly in the newspaper Sunday pages, established the grammar that would define comic books: panel borders, character continuity, and visual storytelling as a distinct medium.

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