From the exhibition
Mr. Hubby—His Wife Is at the Decorative Arts Club
· March 16, 1913

This twelve-panel Sunday strip follows Mr. Hubby's domestic mishap when his wife attends an arts club meeting, leaving him to manage the household chaos. The narrative progresses through escalating slapstick: children wreaking havoc indoors, furniture overturned, Mr. Hubby repeatedly tumbling downstairs and across rooms in exaggerated falls. The strip employs the visual vocabulary of early newspaper comics—sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and physical comedy derived from vaudeville and silent film. Published in 1913, such Sunday pages anchored newspaper entertainment sections and directly influenced the emerging comic book format, establishing narrative pacing and character-driven humor that would define the medium for decades.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain