Before the Flood

John G. Gruelle's Sunday comic strip deploys the visual vocabulary of early newspaper comics: multiple panels, speech balloons, and a sprawling cast of animal and human characters engaged in overlapping gags. The strip's layout scatters jokes across the page—a tall-tale conversation about tariffs and dinosaurs, a child's mishap with pancakes, competing schemes among woodland creatures. Recurring characters inhabit a shared world. The pen-and-ink style, packed with detail and movement, reflects the Sunday supplement tradition where artists had space to experiment beyond the austere dailies. These strips, appearing in papers nationwide, established the formal grammar that would structure comic books: sequential panels advancing narrative and humor through image and text working in tandem.