From the exhibition
Gabe
· June 23, 1912

This Sunday strip follows Gabe, a young boy at play with his cousins. The narrative unfolds across six panels, tracking a game that escalates from simple tag into a chaotic chase around the farmyard. The artist employs sequential panel layout to build comic momentum—each frame advances the action while speech balloons convey dialogue and intention. Recurring characters and a consistent setting ground the humor in recognizable childhood scenarios. The pen-line style and compositional clarity are typical of early newspaper comics, which established the visual language—panel borders, speech balloons, expressive figure drawing—that would become foundational to the comic book form emerging in the decades to follow.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain