The Newly Wed Baby Knows What He Wants

This Sunday comic strip follows a young couple and their infant son through six panels of domestic comedy. The mother attempts to interest the baby in picture books and nursery rhymes, while the father offers various volumes from their home library. The child, however, has other priorities: he wants the telephone book. The strip exemplifies the visual conventions that newspaper comics inherited and refined from earlier illustration—sequential panels, speech balloons, and exaggerated body language to convey emotion and humor. By 1908, the Sunday newspaper comic page had become a established form, with recurring family characters driving gentle domestic humor. The strip's simple narrative arc and reliance on visual gags rather than complex wordplay reflects the emerging language of comics as a distinct medium.