Buddie and His Friends

Robert L. Dickey's *Buddie and His Friends* exemplifies the newspaper comic strip format that emerged in the early 1920s. The strip follows a terrier and his canine companions through domestic misadventures, told across sequential panels with speech balloons. Here, Buddie must be located before a dog show at the Waldorf—a setup that escalates when he licks another dog, creating a "condition" that prevents victory. Dickey employs the visual vocabulary inherited from *The Yellow Kid* and *Krazy Kat*: panel borders isolate narrative moments, expressions convey emotion, and action lines suggest movement. Strips like this, published daily and weekly in newspapers nationwide, established the visual grammar that would define American comic books.