The Duchess Takes a Sail on a Raft

This Sunday strip adapts Lewis Carroll's *Alice* characters into a slapstick maritime adventure. The Duchess, Baby, and the Cheshire Cat navigate a collapsing raft through six panels of escalating chaos—tumbling, near-drowning, and comic misadventure. The strip demonstrates the visual storytelling conventions emerging in early newspaper comics: sequential panels tracking action and reaction, speech balloons carrying dialogue and sound effects, and a recurring cast of literary figures reimagined for weekly audiences. By the 1900s, the Sunday page had become the incubator for comic strip language itself, as artists developed the formal vocabulary—panel borders, word balloons, sight gags—that would define the medium.