The Handy Man, Foxy Grandpa, The Tiger

This Sunday page exemplifies the newspaper comic strip at its origins, deploying six sequential panels to narrate a complete gag. Two boys scheme to prank an elderly gentleman, escalating from pulling a bell cord to full entanglement in rope. The repeated protagonist—Foxy Grandpa—anchors the narrative across panels, while action flows left to right with speech balloons clarifying intent and reaction. The visual grammar here—panel borders, continuous character, escalating consequence—became foundational to comic storytelling. By the early 1900s, such strips ran in Sunday supplements nationwide, reaching millions of readers and establishing the visual language that would define comics for decades.