Makin' B'lieve

Dwiggins' Sunday strip follows children staging an amateur theatrical production. The narrative flows across six panels: kids pitch their show to an adult, rehearse their performance, enact a slapstick rendition of *Hamlet*, and conclude with disaster as props collapse. The strip's visual language—sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring child characters—exemplifies early newspaper comics' debt to vaudeville and silent performance. Dwiggins employs exaggerated body language and dynamic staging to convey physical comedy. The strip's humor derives from the gap between theatrical ambition and chaotic execution, a staple of children's comics that flourished in the newspaper Sunday pages, where comic strips first established themselves as a distinct narrative medium.