Home Wanted by a Baby!

Clare Victor Dwiggins's Sunday strip follows a single narrative across six panels as a baby wreaks escalating havoc in a household. The sequence demonstrates the visual storytelling conventions of early newspaper comics: recurring characters, sequential panel layout tracking cause-and-effect, and hand-lettered speech balloons advancing plot through dialogue and exclamation. Dwiggins employs exaggerated line work and slapstick staging typical of the era's Sunday funnies—anarchic comedy built on physical destruction and domestic chaos. This strip exemplifies how newspaper comics of the 1910s, printed weekly in color, established the visual grammar and narrative structures that would define the medium: the panel as a unit of time and action, the speech balloon as narrative voice, and serialized character-driven humor designed for a mass readership.