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From the exhibition

Alice Gets Cookies from the Duchess, Shure

· January 5, 1902

Alice Gets Cookies from the Duchess, Shure
This Sunday comic strip adapts Lewis Carroll's *Alice's Adventures in Wonderland* for the newspaper page, combining literary source material with visual slapstick. The six-panel sequence follows Alice's pursuit of cookies from the Duchess across domestic and fantastical spaces. The strip employs the formal vocabulary of early comics: rectangular panels arranged in grid formation, speech balloons containing dialogue and asides, and sequential action advancing the joke. The artist uses exaggerated proportions and physical comedy—Alice chasing, the Duchess fleeing—to generate humor for a mass audience. By 1902, Sunday newspaper comics had become a major circulation driver, and artists were developing the visual grammar that would define the medium: panel borders, word balloons, and recurring characters that allowed stories to unfold across multiple frames.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain