Foot Ball Before the Flood

John B. Gruelle's Sunday comic strip depicts a football game at Stone Cliff College interrupted by catastrophic flooding. The narrative unfolds across multiple panels with speech balloons advancing the plot: a coach instructs players, spectators arrive by bicycle, and disaster strikes mid-game. The strip employs the visual vocabulary codified in early newspaper comics—sequential panels, varied vantage points, and dialogue integrated into action. Recurring characters like the halfback Wilbur anchor reader investment across installments. Gruelle's ink line work and densely populated composition are characteristic of the Sunday page format that preceded and directly influenced comic book design. The strip demonstrates how newspaper comics established the medium's fundamental grammar: panel progression, character continuity, and the marriage of word and image that would define the form.