ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

"Wasn't Great-Grandmother Funny?"

Nell Brinkley · 1911

"Wasn't Great-Grandmother Funny?"
A newspaper feature laid out like an album spread. Two framed portraits sit side by side — a woman half-buried under roses and ribbons, dated 1825, and beside her a sharper 1911 beauty in a wide dark hat — and below them a long-haired girl leans over an open "Album," smiling at what she finds. The caption makes the point gently: just as a child laughs at her great-grandmother's picture and chirps "Wasn't she funny?", so will some future kid turn these very pages and laugh at the girl of now. Fashion commentary, light social satire, and a note of quiet melancholy about time, all carried in Brinkley's dense, curling line. This was daily work, printed to be thrown away by morning.

Nell Brinkley Public domain