From the exhibition
Professor Hypnotiser and His Wonderful Power
· 1905

A six-panel Sunday comic featuring a tall, formally dressed hypnotist who uses his powers to manipulate a bourgeois family's domestic life. The strip progresses from the professor's introduction to the parents, through increasingly chaotic scenes at dinner and around the home, culminating in physical mayhem as the family members act against their will. The comic employs sequential panel structure with speech balloons to convey narrative and character voice—formal techniques that emerged from newspaper comics of the 1890s onward. The hypnotist character, dressed in tails and top hat, functions as the anarchic agent disrupting middle-class propriety, a recurring comedic formula in early newspaper strips that prioritized visual gags and exaggerated body language over subtle humor.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain