How Do They Do It?

This Sunday comic strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary that newspaper comics had perfected by the 1910s: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters in exaggerated dress, and escalating gags. The narrative follows a simple comedic premise—how performers make money—through multiple scenes with different character types: a stage magician, a bird act, a comedian performing for theater audiences, and finally a lecturer addressing his crowd. The strip's construction, with its varied panel sizes, sight gags, and dialogue-driven humor, exemplifies how newspaper comics developed the grammar of sequential art that would directly influence the commercial comic book format emerging in the 1930s.