How Do They Do It?

This Sunday strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary emerging in early twentieth-century newspaper comics. Organized in six panels of varying sizes, the narrative follows a simple premise: how do criminals manage their elaborate schemes? Each panel isolates a different criminal enterprise—from street theft to con artistry to safecracking—with characters explaining their methods in speech balloons. The artist uses exaggerated physiognomy and body language to convey character types, while panel borders and sequential arrangement create a cinematic flow readers would recognize. The strip exemplifies how newspapers' comic pages functioned as laboratories for visual storytelling, where artists refined the formal language of comics that would later define the medium.