Alice Gets an Object Lesson

This Sunday strip adapts Lewis Carroll's Alice character into the newspaper comics format, which was still crystallizing its visual language. The four-panel layout tracks a narrative sequence: Alice encounters a goat, attempts interaction, faces mild peril, and escapes—a classic comic structure of escalating gags and visual punchlines. The artist employs speech balloons, expressive linework, and spatial composition to convey action across panels. By the early 1900s, newspaper Sunday pages had become laboratories for sequential storytelling, where artists refined the techniques that would define comics: panel borders as temporal markers, character expressions for comedy, and the rhythm of revelation across space. This strip exemplifies how newspaper comic strips invented and standardized the medium's visual grammar before comic books existed as a distinct format.