The Duchess Gives a Card Party—Alice Is There, Too

This Sunday newspaper strip adapts Lewis Carroll's *Alice in Wonderland* through sequential art, establishing visual conventions that would define the comics medium. The six-panel layout uses speech balloons and consistent character design to convey narrative and gag timing across frames. The Duchess's card party descends into chaos as Alice objects to the violence—a scene Carroll wrote but the strip artist amplifies through physical comedy and exaggerated body language. Early newspaper comics like this one created the visual grammar—panel borders, word-image integration, repeated characters—that became foundational to comic books. The strip demonstrates how Edwardian Sunday papers serialized literature through illustration, transforming written stories into a new form that emphasized sight gags and caricature.