The House of Mirth

This Sunday newspaper comic strip employs the visual conventions pioneered by cartoonists in the 1890s: multiple panels arranged in grid format, speech balloons, and recurring characters. The strip follows a cast of small figures through a chaotic domestic setting, with exaggerated physical comedy and slapstick gags driving the narrative across six panels. The dense compositions and energetic linework were typical of newspaper comics of the era, which served as laboratory for the visual grammar that would define comic books. Sunday pages like this, distributed nationally through syndication, reached millions of readers and established the sequential art medium as a distinct form separate from single-panel editorial cartoons.