Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye

This Sunday strip follows Lucy through a cyclone—a natural disaster that was frequent subject matter in early comic narratives. The strip demonstrates the panel-based visual storytelling that newspapers had adopted from European sources by the 1890s. Speech balloons carry dialogue; sequential panels show cause and effect. Lucy visits a cyclone seller, receives warnings about the coming storm, attempts to flee with her suitcase, and is caught in the vortex. The final panel shifts to a companion character (Sophie) offering a farewell. The strip uses exaggeration and slapstick—standard tools of newspaper comics—to generate humor from physical predicament. Early Sunday comics like this one established recurring characters, serialized gags, and the visual conventions that would define the medium through the twentieth century.