Minute Movies

This Sunday page strips down narrative to its essentials: *Stray Pearls*, a society comedy, unfolds across twelve panels in a style typical of early 1920s newspaper comics. Each panel advances the plot—a stolen pearl necklace, a social gathering, accusations and denials—with dialogue balloons and sequential staging that became the visual foundation of comic books. The artist uses panel borders and speech bubbles to pace the gag and control reader flow, techniques refined from *The Yellow Kid* and *The Katzenjammer Kids*. Recurring characters in comic strips like this provided newspapers with daily serialized entertainment and established the vocabulary of panel progression that would define the medium for a century.