The Man With an Elephant on His Hands

This Sunday newspaper strip follows a hapless protagonist who has acquired an elephant and must manage the chaos that ensues. Across six panels, the narrative develops through sight gags and escalating complications: the man attempts to hide, bathe, and ultimately lose the animal, while his increasingly frantic dialogue drives the humor. The strip demonstrates the visual conventions that shaped early comics—distinct panels with varied compositions, speech balloons advancing plot and character, and a recurring protagonist in absurd situations. Published during the medium's foundational era, when Sunday comics pages were the primary venue for sequential narrative art, this strip exemplifies how newspapers introduced readers to the panel-based storytelling grammar that would define comics for generations to come.