The Duchess Decides to Boil the City Water

This Sunday strip adapts Lewis Carroll's *Alice in Wonderland*, translating the Duchess's kitchen scene into a domestic comedy. The artist uses six panels to build narrative tension: the Duchess announces her plan to boil city water, servants and family react with alarm, and the final panels escalate to panic as they discover the contaminated results. The strip demonstrates early comic grammar—varied panel sizes, expressive caricature, and sequential storytelling through dialogue and action. Newspaper comics of this era drew heavily from literature and vaudeville, establishing visual conventions that shaped the emerging medium of comic strips and eventually comic books.