Alice Alarms the Hired Man

This Sunday strip follows Alice through four panels of escalating chaos. In the first, she spots an abandoned scarecrow; by the second, she's enlisted a rotund companion to help remove it. The third panel shows the pair hauling down their prize, while the final panel reveals the "scarecrow" was actually a hired farmhand—now very much awake and alarmed. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comics' visual storytelling: sequential panels with speech balloons advance a simple gag through clear cause-and-effect action. The loose, sketchy linework and rural setting were typical of turn-of-the-century Sunday funnies, which appeared in newspapers nationwide and directly preceded the comic book format.