Home Wanted by a Baby!

Clare Victor Dwiggins's Sunday strip follows a stork delivering a baby to various unsuitable households. The stork's exasperated monologue, rendered in speech balloons across sequential panels, drives the narrative as each location—a tenement, a busy office, a moving van—proves incompatible with infant care. Dwiggins employs the visual grammar now standard to comics: multiple tiers of rectangular panels, expressive line work, and recurring characters (the determined stork, harried adults, the vulnerable baby) that generate humor through escalating situations. Originally published in newspapers as part of the Sunday funny pages, this strip exemplifies how the medium's formal conventions—panel borders, word balloons, sight gags—evolved from late-nineteenth-century magazine illustration into the visual language of modern comics.