Mr. and Mrs.

This newspaper comic strip by Briggs follows a husband and wife through a domestic misunderstanding: he arrives home late, she suspects infidelity, leading to an escalating series of confrontations across multiple rooms and a staircase. The strip demonstrates the visual storytelling conventions that shaped early comics—sequential panels, speech balloons, and physical comedy that unfolds through spatial progression. By the 1920s, Sunday pages like this had become standard newspaper features, establishing the formal language that would define the medium: panel borders directing eye movement, dialogue advancing plot, and exaggerated body language conveying emotion. Such strips were the direct ancestors of the comic books that emerged a decade later.