Botts the Bear

This Sunday newspaper comic strip follows Botts, an anthropomorphic bear, through a domestic misadventure. A character named Jack explains the bees belong to the house; Botts arrives for lunch and accidentally disrupts a beehive, leading to chaos at the dinner table. The strip employs sequential panel narrative with speech balloons—visual conventions developed by newspaper cartoonists of this era. Recurring animal characters, sight gags tied to physical comedy, and multi-panel storytelling became hallmarks of early comic strips. Sunday pages like this, appearing in newspapers nationwide, established the formal language and character-driven humor that would define American comics through the twentieth century.