The Teasers: Bobby and Ali's Jealous Disposition

This Sunday comic strip follows Bobby and Ali through six panels of escalating mischief centered on Valentine's Day jealousy. Bobby refuses to make a valentine; when Ali creates one instead, Bobby retaliates with an arrow, then a ball—each panel advancing the physical comedy. The strip employs the visual conventions that defined early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, exaggerated character proportions, and sight gags building toward a punchline. By the early 1900s, the Sunday funny pages had become laboratories for visual storytelling, where artists developed the grammar of comics—panel borders, word balloons, and recurring characters—that would directly influence the emergence of comic books two decades later.