Joe and Asbestos

A Sunday strip by Ken Kling following Joe, a small man with an outsized appetite for trouble, and his horse Asbestos as they navigate schemes and scrapes. Here Joe tangles with a gang at Belmont Park racetrack, leading to escalating chaos across six panels. The strip employs the visual conventions that defined newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons advancing narrative, recurring characters returning weekly, and physical comedy drawn with exaggerated line work. Such strips, syndicated across hundreds of papers, created the visual language later adopted by comic books—panel gutters, word-image integration, and character consistency that allowed readers to follow complex action at a glance.