From the exhibition
The Newlyweds' Baby Tried to Save the China
· 1907

This Sunday comic demonstrates the visual conventions that emerged from newspaper strips into early comic books: sequential panels, speech balloons, and a recurring cast navigating domestic situations. The strip follows a young couple and their baby through escalating chaos—a dropped plate triggers a cascade of destruction. The artist uses panel progression to build comedic timing, with the baby's increasingly frantic vocalizations ("DA-DA," "ME-O-W!") propelling the narrative. Such strips were the direct predecessors of bound comic publications; the formal vocabulary of layout, lettering, and character consistency invented by newspaper cartoonists became the grammar of the medium.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain