From the exhibition
Home Wanted by a Baby!
· April 25, 1913

This Sunday strip by Clare Victor Dwiggins follows a gentleman in top hat and formal dress as he attempts to find a home for an abandoned baby left on his doorstep. Across six panels, the narrative unfolds through escalating comedic situations: the man frantically searches for shelter, encounters resistance from homeowners, and grows increasingly disheveled as the infant proves unmanageable. Dwiggins employs the visual vocabulary of early newspaper comics—sequential panels, speech balloons, and exaggerated character expressions—to build a coherent story across a single page. The strip exemplifies how Sunday funny papers served as laboratories for cartooning technique during the medium's formative decade, establishing conventions that would define comic narrative for generations.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain