Before the Flood

This Sunday comic page by John B. Gruelle depicts a raucous prehistoric scene organized around competing attractions: a Grand Race and Staking Tonight booth on the left, and The Tom Tom Marching Club's procession center-right. Dinosaurs, early humans, and fantastic creatures populate the composition in Gruelle's characteristic loose ink line. Speech balloons and sight gags—a character shouting "Shoo!," another "Wheesh!"—drive the humor across multiple focal points rather than sequential panels. The strip exemplifies the visual density and character-driven comedy of early newspaper Sunday pages, where artists experimented with layout and repetition of figures to anchor recurring comedic situations. Gruelle's style influenced the development of comic strip grammar during the medium's foundational decades.