Joe and Asbestos

This Sunday strip by Ken Kling follows Joe and his sidekick Asbestos through a physical comedy sequence involving a bathtub. The narrative unfolds across six panels: Joe explains his predicament with water overflow, demonstrates his misery in the tub, receives unwelcome advice from a visitor, and attempts various solutions that spiral into slapstick mishap. Speech balloons carry the dialogue while action lines convey motion and tumbling. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comic conventions—recurring characters, episodic gag construction, and expressive figure drawing—that became foundational to comic art. By the 1920s, Sunday funnies had become essential newspaper features, establishing the visual vocabulary of sequential art that would evolve into the modern comic book medium.