The Valentines of the Duchess and the Copper

This Sunday strip adapts Lewis Carroll's *Alice in Wonderland*, staging a Valentine's Day exchange between the Duchess and the Copper (policeman). The artist employs the visual conventions solidifying in early newspaper comics: sequential panels with clear action progression, speech balloons conveying dialogue and character voice, and recurring recognizable figures. The humor operates through both visual gags and wordplay—the characters' exaggerated expressions and physical comedy anchor jokes about mistaken identity and romantic misunderstanding. Early comic strips like this one inherited techniques from nineteenth-century illustrated humor while establishing the panel-based grammar that would define the medium. Such literary adaptations were common in the Sunday funny pages, where artists translated familiar stories into the emerging sequential art form for mass newspaper audiences.