Bobby Make-Believe

A boy's imaginative flight over Berlin unfolds across nine panels in this Sunday comic strip. Bobby daydreams himself as an aviator on a bombing run, moving from ground preparations through aerial combat to crash landing. The strip demonstrates the visual innovations of early newspaper comics: panel sequencing to show narrative progression, speech balloons anchoring character voice, and recurring child protagonists inhabiting fantastical scenarios. Published during World War I, the strip reflects popular entertainment's engagement with contemporary warfare. The artist uses varied perspective and scale to convey motion and spatial relationships—techniques that became foundational to comic art's visual grammar.