Joe and Asbestos

This Sunday strip follows Joe and his sidekick Asbestos through a domestic financial crisis. After a birthday celebration leaves Joe short on funds, he hatches a scheme to move a piano—a sight gag that unfolds across six panels with escalating physical comedy. Ken Kling's strip employs the visual vocabulary that newspaper comics had established by the 1920s: sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring characters in everyday situations, and exaggerated body language to convey action and emotion. Such strips appeared weekly in Sunday supplements and daily papers, reaching millions of readers and establishing the narrative and visual grammar that would define the comic book form.