ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Simon Simple Meets Auntie

· Sunday, August 27, 1905

Simon Simple Meets Auntie
This Sunday strip from the Washington Times follows Simon Simple's encounter with his visiting aunt through six panels of slapstick comedy. The narrative unfolds across a railway platform and domestic setting, using speech balloons and sequential framing to track the action from introduction through escalating chaos. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comic storytelling, where recurring characters and visual gags drove reader engagement across dailies and Sunday supplements. Such strips populated the pages that directly preceded and shaped the first comic books, establishing conventions of panel layout, character continuity, and humor timing that defined the medium.

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