Little Alice Is Kidnapped: Pretty Near

This six-panel Sunday strip adapts Lewis Carroll's Alice character into a contemporary kidnapping narrative. The sequential art employs the visual conventions developing in early newspaper comics: discrete panels that advance time, speech balloons for dialogue, and recurring characters (the Duchess, Mickey, Alice, police officers). The artist uses panel borders and curtained interiors to control the reader's eye across each frame. Action escalates from negotiation to chaos—the kidnapper's escape, a physical struggle, and finally celebration. The strip demonstrates how newspaper cartoonists of the early 1900s were establishing comics as a distinct medium, combining verbal wit with sequential imagery to tell complete stories within editorial space.