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Bird Center: Picnic at Hornbeck
In 1903 and 1904, McCutcheon drew scenes of a fictional town called Bird Center, inspired by his experiences growing up near Lafayette, Indiana. A whole town crowded into the comic each week, and readers became obsessed with the soap opera, which gently poked fun at rural life. Samuelson calls the series a precursor of today’s graphic novels. “It had quite a following,” he says. “People had Bird Center parties. You would come as your favorite character.” In this panel, tintype artist J. Milton Brown sits at lower left, wearing pants too short for his legs. “He’s a little uncomfortable being in a social situation,” Samuelson says. “The woman sketching a picture [in the upper right] is Captain Fry’s daughter, the town’s women’s libber.” Brown doesn’t know it yet, but Miss Fry has her eye on him; later in the series, they get married. Upper left: “Riley Peters, who always has a thousand girlfriends [in the series], is carving initials in the tree.”

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