From the exhibition
The Busy Bees — Children's Page, Omaha Daily Bee
· March 16, 1913

This Sunday page from the *Omaha Daily Bee* is not a conventional comic strip but a children's literary page — "The Busy Bees" — crowded with reader-submitted prose stories, birthday listings, verse, and moral-improvement columns such as "Rules for Young Writers." Small portrait vignettes of child contributors punctuate the text columns; a central oval photograph of a girl named Betty Kennedy anchors the layout. The page belongs to the broader Sunday supplement tradition from which comic art emerged: Pulitzer's and Hearst's color Sunday pages of the 1890s established the weekly children's section as a mass-circulation laboratory where recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons first coalesced into what collectors would eventually bind and sell as comic books. This page represents the quieter, prose-heavy cousin of that revolution — proof that the Sunday supplement was always as much schoolroom as funhouse.
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