Mr. Wad Is Still Sworn Off on Smoking—But He's Weakening, He's Weakening!

This comic strip follows Mr. Wad's struggle to quit smoking, a popular humor topic in early newspaper comics. The artist uses sequential panels with distinct speech balloons to advance the gag: Wad is tempted by a cigar, resists through willpower, then weakens as his cousin Cicero arrives to test his resolve. The strip exemplifies the visual conventions emerging in Sunday newspaper pages—multiple panels per row, overlapping dialogue, and character types (the tempter, the weakling) that readers followed daily. By 1913, the newspaper comic strip had become the primary vehicle for developing visual narrative and recurring characters, establishing the grammar that would define comic books decades later.