Alice's Adventures in Funnyland

This Chicago Sunday Tribune comic strip follows Little Alice and her dog Spotty through a sequence of escalating mishaps. The four-panel layout tracks a narrative arc: Alice and the Duchess encounter the mad dog; the animal chases them across a park; chaos erupts as onlookers react; the dog finally corners its victims by a tree. The strip employs the visual grammar becoming standard in early newspaper comics—sequential panels advancing time, speech balloons capturing dialogue, and a recurring cast of characters. The artist uses dramatic contrast between figure and landscape to guide the reader's eye, while exaggerated poses and expressions convey physical comedy. Such Sunday supplements, appearing in major papers during the 1900s, established the formal language that would define the emerging comic book medium.