Kernel Cootie

This Sunday strip follows the misadventures of Kernel Cootie and his cohorts through four panels of slapstick comedy. A character arrives with money from Mr. Cash, only to be swindled by Cootie's schemes involving fake stock and questionable deals. The strip employs the visual conventions now standard to comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters with distinct personalities, and exaggerated physical comedy to convey narrative. By 1920, newspaper comic strips had become a dominant entertainment medium, establishing the visual language that would define the emerging comic book industry—panel layouts, word-image integration, and character-driven humor that could sustain ongoing series.