ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Their Only Child!—He Has Another Tooth!

· December 21, 1913

Their Only Child!—He Has Another Tooth!
A Sunday newspaper comic strip depicting the domestic comedy of new parenthood. Parents fuss over their infant's emerging tooth across four rows of sequential panels, each advancing the gag through escalating celebration and exaggerated reactions. The strip employs the visual language that defined early comics: panel borders guiding narrative flow, speech balloons carrying dialogue, and recurring characters—the proud parents and their baby—appearing consistently across scenes. By the 1910s, such comic strips had become standard fare in Sunday newspapers nationwide, establishing the visual grammar and character-based humor that would form the foundation of the comic book medium. The strip's domestic subject matter and sentimental humor were typical of the era's family-oriented newspaper comics.

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