Midget Movies

Wheelan's *Midget Movies* presented miniature film parodies across multiple panels, each strip a compressed comedy riffing on popular cinema. The Sunday page and daily strips show the strip's range: sight gags (potato-eating, phantom disguises), recurring characters, and punchy dialogue delivered through speech balloons. The six-panel grid and sequential narrative structures—developed by newspaper cartoonists in the previous two decades—create rhythm and pacing mimicking film cuts. By 1918, such strips had become the visual vocabulary of comics: discrete panels, character consistency, and word-image integration that would define the medium when comic books reprinted newspaper strips in the 1930s.