ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Fluffy Ruffles

· June 21, 1908

Fluffy Ruffles
This Sunday page by Wallace Morgan follows Fluffy Ruffles and companions through a misadventure involving a runaway bull. The strip employs the visual conventions that defined early newspaper comics: multiple panels arranged to guide reader flow, speech balloons carrying dialogue and narrative exposition, and recurring characters in episodic situations. Morgan's ink line work and sequential arrangement of scenes—from dialogue and setup through escalating action to climactic encounter—demonstrate how newspaper Sunday pages and dailies established the formal grammar adopted by later comic books. The strip's humor derives from physical gags and character interaction rather than text alone, marking the medium's shift toward visual storytelling as its primary vehicle.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain