Frappe the Snowman and His Papa

This Sunday comic strip follows Frappe, an anthropomorphic snowman, and his rotund father through a series of winter escapades. The six-panel layout uses speech balloons and sequential action to develop a simple narrative: the father snowman's bungling attempts at play end in his melting. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comics' visual vocabulary—recurring characters, panel-to-panel continuity, and sight gags—that emerged from the Sunday supplement pages around the turn of the twentieth century. Such strips, published weekly in newspapers, established the narrative and artistic foundations that would define the comic book medium.