Home Wanted by a Baby!

Clare Victor Dwiggins's Sunday strip follows a frantic household's attempt to prepare their home for an arriving infant. Panels flow left to right through escalating domestic chaos: a woman directs cleaning efforts, visitors arrive bearing gifts, a man holds a baby aloft amid feathered decorations, and overwhelmed adults scramble among stacked furniture and belongings. Dwiggins employs the visual conventions established by early newspaper comics—multiple rectangular panels with speech balloons, sequential action, and exaggerated character expressions. The strip's humor derives from physical comedy and situational disorder. By 1913, such weekly installments in major newspapers had become popular vehicles for comedic storytelling, establishing the narrative and visual strategies that would define comic strips and eventually comic books.