From the exhibition
Home Wanted by a Baby
· September 1, 1913

This Sunday comic strip follows a foundling baby's attempts to secure housing by responding to newspaper advertisements. The narrative unfolds across six panels, each introducing a new household and the infant's increasingly desperate pleas for shelter. The strip employs the visual conventions established by early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, exaggerated character expressions, and sight gags relying on physical comedy. The recurring baby protagonist drives the episodic plot—a structure common to newspaper dailies and Sunday pages of the 1910s. By this period, comics had become a central feature of American newspapers, developing the visual grammar and storytelling techniques that would define the medium for decades. Artists working in this era pioneered the use of panels, captions, and dialogue to create narrative flow, laying the foundation for later comic books.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain