And They Get By With It [The Barber]

E.C. Segar's Sunday strip exemplifies the visual vocabulary that transformed newspaper comics into a distinct art form. Six panels follow a barber and his customer through an escalating series of treatments—shaving, massage, the "Windburn Dance," and a final extraction scheme. Segar uses sequential panel layout, speech balloons, and expressive linework to convey physical comedy and character reaction. The recurring barber character anchors the narrative across panels, while exaggerated poses and overlapping action create momentum. Published in the Sunday funnies during the medium's formative era, this strip demonstrates how cartoonists of the 1910s-20s established the visual grammar—panel progression, dialogue integration, comic timing through image sequence—that became foundational to later comic book storytelling.