Just Dog

A four-panel strip following Buddy the dog as his owner shows off an expensive diamond collar to other dogs in the neighborhood. The joke progresses through their reactions—admiration, envy, and dismissal—before the final panel reveals the irony: the fancy collar means nothing to dogs themselves. Drawn in the energetic crosshatch style of early 1920s newspaper comics, *Just Dog* uses speech balloons, sequential panels, and a recurring cast of animal characters to build visual humor. The strip exemplifies how the newspaper funny pages developed the formal language of comics: panel layout to control timing, dialogue to drive narrative, and character types that readers recognized week to week.