Betty

A Sunday newspaper strip by C. A. Voight following Betty and her boyfriend through a boating mishap. The strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary that defined early comics: rectangular panels arranged in rows, speech balloons advancing narrative and gags, and a recurring cast of characters in episodic adventure. Betty's antics—from domestic scenes to slapstick water disasters—typify the humor strips that filled newspaper funny pages in the 1910s and 1920s. These Sunday pages, printed in color and distributed nationally, formed the foundation of American comic art before comic books as a distinct medium emerged in the 1930s. Newspaper strips established the panel-based sequential narrative that would define the form.