From the exhibition
Little Pal—No More Smoking
· January 2, 1914

This six-panel strip follows a child's intervention in an adult's smoking habit. The sequence uses sequential art to build narrative: the child announces a New Year resolution, confronts the smoker with a cigar, and escalates through physical comedy until the adult relents and visits a tobacconist shop instead. The strip employs the visual conventions that defined early newspaper comics—distinct panels, speech balloons, recurring character types, and sight gags that advance the plot. The exaggerated facial expressions and body language carry the humor across wordless transitions, demonstrating how the medium conveyed story through image rather than text alone, a technique foundational to comic strip development in the 1910s.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain