From the exhibition
Mr. Wad Gets Real Crusty on the 'Pie Pan'
· January 24, 1911

This Sunday strip follows Mr. Wad's escalating frustration with a pie pan, building from irritated muttering through increasingly frantic roars as the object launches projectiles and chaos spreads across six panels. The artist uses dynamic lettering and motion lines to convey sound and action—visual techniques that emerged in early newspaper comics. Speech balloons anchor character emotion while the sequential panel layout guides readers through a narrative arc of comedic escalation. The strip exemplifies how Sunday newspaper pages became laboratories for experimenting with visual storytelling, establishing conventions—recurring characters, exaggerated expressions, sight gags tied to household objects—that would become foundational to the comic book medium.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain