Goops by Gelett Burgess

Gelett Burgess's *Goops* follows a round-headed character through nine panels of domestic instruction. In this episode, the child learns manners: requesting money politely, saying "please," and yielding to parental authority. The strip employs speech balloons, sequential panel composition, and a recurring protagonist—visual conventions that emerged from newspaper comic strips in the 1890s and 1900s. *Goops* exemplifies how Sunday newspaper pages became laboratories for narrative sequencing and character development, laying groundwork for the comic book form. Burgess, an author and humorist, used the strip medium to deliver moral lessons to children, making the newspaper comic page both entertainment and pedagogical tool.