Prehistoric Football

John B. Gruelle's *Prehistoric Football* imagines cavemen playing an early version of the sport, a humorous premise that anchors the strip's visual comedy. The narrative follows J. Wilbur Walrushide, a halfback leaving for Yale, through a sequence of prehistoric misadventures. Gruelle employs the sequential panel structure and speech balloons that defined Sunday newspaper comics, using exaggerated anatomy and creature design to drive the gags. The strip demonstrates how cartoonists of this era built recurring characters and elaborate visual worlds across the newspaper page—techniques that would become foundational to comic book storytelling. Gruelle's thick-lined style and anthropomorphic comedy were typical of the early comics that established visual language still used today.