The Duchess and the Copper Go Skating

This three-panel Sunday strip deploys the visual vocabulary of early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, escalating action, and recurring characters from a familiar fictional world. The Duchess and Mickey encounter danger on ice, culminating in collision and comic catastrophe. The strip exemplifies how newspaper cartoonists of the 1900s adapted literary sources—here, references to *Alice in Wonderland*—into serialized humor for mass audiences. Dense crosshatching and expressive line work convey motion and chaos across panels, establishing the grammar of comic narrative that would define the medium for decades.