Adventures of Johnny Mouse

This strip demonstrates the visual conventions solidifying in early newspaper comics. A white mouse and black cat engage in a four-panel escalating gag sequence: the mouse boasts of superiority, the cat responds with confidence, physical comedy ensues, and the cat's comeuppance concludes the joke. Speech balloons and sequential panel layout guide the reader's eye and timing. Recurring animal characters—established types in popular culture—carried stories across multiple installments in Sunday and daily editions. Such strips, appearing in thousands of newspapers nationwide, established the grammar of comics: panels as units of time, dialogue balloons, physical sight gags, and character-driven humor that would define the medium through the twentieth century.