From the exhibition
Home Again Once More Yet
· March 16, 1913

This twelve-panel Sunday comic from the Omaha Daily Bee follows Uncle Hiatus through a slapstick journey home from a cannibal island. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comics' visual language: sequential panels with speech balloons, exaggerated caricatures, and sight gags building toward escalating chaos. As Sunday comics proliferated in American newspapers, they established the formal vocabulary—panel borders, word-picture integration, recurring characters—that would define the medium. These weekly supplements were essential to newspaper circulation and became the direct precursor to the comic book format that emerged in the 1930s.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain