Joe and Asbestos

A Sunday newspaper comic strip by Ken Kling featuring Joe and his horse Asbestos. The strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary of 1920s comics: sequential panels with speech balloons advancing a continuous narrative, recurring characters in familiar situations, and sight gags tied to dialogue. Joe arranges a restaurant dinner, planning seating arrangements and menu selections across six panels. The humor relies on character interaction and situational comedy typical of newspaper strips that formed the direct ancestry of the modern comic book. By the 1920s, such daily and Sunday strips had established the grammar—panel borders, word balloons, expressive linework—that would define sequential art for decades.