Mr. Wad Came Near Making an Awful Hit at the Rodeo

This five-panel Sunday strip follows Mr. Wad's misadventure at a rodeo shooting competition. The narrative unfolds through sequential panels with speech balloons carrying dialogue and internal monologue: Wad announces his shooting prowess, spots a target marked with a bull's-eye, takes aim, and accidentally fires at the Chief instead, who responds with outrage. The final panel shows the target penetrated by a bullet—just not Wad's. The strip exemplifies early comic strip conventions: recurring character types, visual gags dependent on mistiming and misdirection, and panel-to-panel narrative flow. By 1913, newspaper comics had established the visual grammar—speech balloons, sequential framing, expressive caricature—that would define the medium's development through the twentieth century.