The Call

This Sunday page features five named characters—Perkins, Link, Harry, C.H. Wellington, and Joe Laselle—in a dreamlike Fourth of July sequence. The strip uses the visual conventions that defined early newspaper comics: portrait headshots identifying cast members, speech balloons carrying dialogue and internal monologue, sequential panels advancing a single narrative, and elaborate cross-hatching to render tone and movement. The composition moves from intimate character moments to expansive scenes of fireworks and chaos, with smaller vignettes nested within larger ones. Published during the era when Sunday newspaper comics were establishing themselves as a distinct medium, this work demonstrates how cartoonists translated the grammar of illustration into the dynamic, panel-based storytelling that would become fundamental to American comic art.