From the exhibition
Home Wanted by a Baby
· 1914

This Sunday strip depicts a baby in a basket left at successive doorways, each householder reacting with shock before passing the infant along. The narrative unfolds across six panels with escalating comedic rejection, culminating in the baby's resourceful self-placement in a new home. The strip employs the visual conventions established in early newspaper comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, exaggerated body language, and recurring character types. By 1914, such strips populated the Sunday pages of major newspapers, creating the visual language that would define comic books. The episodic humor and domestic setting were staples of early-twentieth-century newspaper humor, where daily and Sunday installments introduced millions of readers to the panel-based narrative form.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain