ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Makin' B'lieve

· June 23, 1912

Makin' B'lieve
A six-panel Sunday strip by Dwiggins following children at play and their imaginative games. The narrative moves from the children discovering a stenographer at work, to role-playing as adults conducting business, to a dramatic sequence where their fantasy spirals into chaos with animals and mayhem. The strip demonstrates the visual conventions emerging in early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, exaggerated expressions, recurring child characters, and escalating slapstick action. Dwiggins employs dynamic line work and compositional variety to guide readers through the narrative, establishing techniques that would become foundational to comic strip storytelling and later influence the comic book form.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain