Flying to Fame: Baird Makes His Getaway

This newspaper comic strip by Ernest Henderson follows an aviation adventure across four panels. A character explains his daring escape scheme involving a captured pilot and the mechanics of a heated fuselage. The action unfolds through dialogue and physical comedy—chase, pursuit, and flight—rendered in the crisp pen-and-ink style typical of 1920s dailies. The strip exemplifies how newspaper comics of this era employed sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and slapstick narrative momentum to sustain reader interest across multiple installments. Such strips formed the visual vocabulary that would define comic books.