Before the Flood

By John B. Gruelle, this Sunday comic strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary that shaped early newspaper comics: multiple panels, speech balloons, and a cast of grotesque characters in slapstick scenarios. The strip depicts primitive figures engaged in comedic mishaps—hauling goods, miscommunicating, and bungling tasks—arranged across the page in a loose narrative sequence. Gruelle's exaggerated line work and densely packed composition typify the Sunday supplement style that preceded the comic book format. The strip's humor relies on physical gags and crude dialogue, hallmarks of the newspaper comic tradition that emerged in the 1890s and defined popular visual storytelling through the early twentieth century.