Mr. Titus Wad Is Some Dead Shot Himself, By Heck!

This four-panel strip follows Mr. Titus Wad's fumbling attempt to shoot a target. The narrative unfolds through sequential panels with speech balloons, a visual technique that shaped early comic storytelling. The artist uses exaggerated character design and physical comedy—Wad's repeated misfires and increasingly panicked expressions—to sustain the gag across panels. By 1913, newspaper Sunday pages like this had become laboratories for visual narrative, where artists developed the panel-to-panel flow and character consistency that would define comics. The recurring character and continuity of action across frames demonstrate how newspaper strips trained readers in the grammar of sequential art before comic books existed as a medium.