Alice and the Duchess at the Circus

This Sunday newspaper strip adapts Lewis Carroll's *Alice* characters into contemporary vaudeville settings. The six-panel sequence shows Alice and the Duchess encountering a sideshow attraction—"Biggest Woman on Earth"—a common circus draw of the era. The strip's visual language relies on conventions now standard to comics: numbered panels guiding narrative sequence, speech balloons anchored to speakers, and character recognition through repeated design. Early newspaper strips like this one, appearing in Sunday supplements alongside society pages and advertisements, established the visual grammar that would define comic books. Artists working in this period synthesized illustration, typography, and sequential art to reach mass audiences with humor that traded in both literary reference and period topicality.