Buddy's Baby Sister — You'd Think She Was the Only Baby in the World

This Sunday comic strip from a San Francisco newspaper exemplifies the visual conventions that became fundamental to comics: multi-panel layouts, speech balloons, and recurring characters in domestic situations. The strip follows Buddy and his family as they respond to a new baby sister, mining humor from the chaos of infant care and sibling rivalry. The artist uses sequential panels to build comic timing, moving readers' eyes across the page in a narrative flow. Published during comics' emergence as a distinct medium within newspapers, strips like this one reached millions of readers weekly and established the visual grammar—panel borders, expressive line work, sight gags—that would define the form for generations. The family-centered humor and slapstick action appealed to broad audiences, making Sunday comics essential to newspapers' circulation wars of the early twentieth century.