Kernel Cootie — The Referee

A four-panel Sunday strip showing domestic chaos as Pa Dub fights the neighbors while Ma calls him inside. The gag escalates across panels: Pa and a neighbor brawl, Bub describes his father's fighting prowess to his grandmother, and when Ma finally intervenes, the children tumble into the fray. *Kernel Cootie* exemplifies early newspaper comic strips, which established the visual vocabulary of modern comics—speech balloons, sequential panel narrative, and recurring family characters in humorous situations. Such strips ran daily and Sunday in papers nationwide during the 1920s, forming the foundation of the comic book medium that would emerge in the 1930s.