Grimes's Goat

A newspaper Sunday comic strip following the misadventures of a mischievous goat and its human antagonists. The narrative unfolds across eight panels using sequential art conventions—distinct frames, speech balloons, and visual continuity—that were still novel in the early twentieth century. The goat wreaks havoc on city streets, evading capture by crowds and police while its chaos escalates from panel to panel. The strip exemplifies how newspapers serialized humor through recurring characters and escalating gags, establishing visual storytelling techniques that would become the foundation of comic books. Early strips like this one demonstrated that sequential narrative art could sustain reader interest across multiple installments, turning the comic strip into a mass medium that shaped all subsequent graphic storytelling.