Grimes's Goat

In this Sunday newspaper strip by Steirigans, two men scheme to win a suit of clothes by capturing Grimes's goat from a store. The goat, labeled with its owner's name, becomes the unwitting vehicle for physical comedy across eight panels. Characters pursue and struggle with their quarry in escalating chaos—collisions, tumbles, and the animal's stubborn resistance to capture. The strip demonstrates early comic strip conventions: recurring characters, sequential panel arrangement progressing through time, speech balloons advancing plot and gags, and slapstick as narrative engine. Sunday funnies like this, appearing in newspapers nationwide, established the visual vocabulary and storytelling methods that would define American comic strips and eventually the comic book form itself.