Alice at the Cider Press

This four-panel Sunday strip follows Alice through a slapstick sequence at a rural cider press, a setting rich with visual gags and machinery. The artist employs sequential narration to build comic momentum: Alice begins with a donkey, escalating through collisions with barrels and workers across the panels. The strip demonstrates early newspaper comics' reliance on physical comedy and environmental detail. Recurring characters and continuing situations anchored readers to Sunday pages, establishing narrative flow across panels. Speech balloons carry minimal dialogue, letting the drawings do most of the storytelling—a hallmark of visual comedy in the medium's formative decade. Such strips proved newspapers could sustain serialized humor through expressive linework and inventive panel composition.