The Education of Master Tommy Pip

This Sunday comic strip follows a small boy named Tommy Pip as he encounters an elephant at what appears to be a circus or zoo. The narrative unfolds across six panels, each advancing the joke through escalating chaos: Tommy attempts to feed the animal, which responds with increasingly wild behavior—tossing him, spraying water, and ultimately creating mayhem. The strip employs the visual vocabulary of early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, exaggerated character expressions, and animal antics as primary comedic devices. By 1906, such strips had become standard Sunday fare in American newspapers, establishing the formal grammar that would define comic books decades later.