Tea—Little Ducks

This ten-panel Sunday comic follows a brood of ducklings through a day of mishaps and adventures. Each panel presents a discrete gag—the ducks crowded in a boat, raiding a kitchen, colliding mid-flight, playing with toys—connected by simple narrative progression rather than dialogue. The artist employs the vocabulary of early newspaper comics: anthropomorphic animal characters, slapstick action, sequential panels that build toward physical comedy. The ducks recur from week to week, establishing the recurring-character principle that would become central to comic strips. Published in the Los Angeles Sunday Herald, the strip exemplifies how newspaper Sunday pages served as the primary laboratory for developing comics' visual and narrative grammar in the early 1900s, years before comic books existed as a distinct medium.