A Quiet Night at Howson Lott's

This Sunday comic from the Chicago Sunday Examiner shows a bear loose in a boarding house, disrupting the residents' sleep across twelve sequential panels. The strip employs the visual vocabulary of early newspaper comics: uniform grid layout, speech balloons, recurring characters shown in different poses and predicaments, and sight gags built through panel-to-panel progression. By 1909, the Sunday newspaper page had become the primary vehicle for comic storytelling in America, with artists developing the formal language—framing, perspective, expressive linework—that would define the medium. This strip exemplifies how newspapers serialized humor through regular characters and escalating chaos, establishing narrative conventions that shaped subsequent comic books.