Mr. Titus Wad Almost Won Ten Dollars at the Rodeo

This Sunday comic strip follows Mr. Titus Wad through a rodeo competition in five sequential panels, using the visual language that defined early newspaper comics: bordered panels, speech balloons, and slapstick humor. The narrative progresses from Wad's confident entry into the bucking event, through violent dismounts, to an absurdist finale where a timer declares his ride "official." The strip exemplifies how newspaper comics of the 1910s inherited conventions from earlier broadsheet humor and dime novels while establishing the panel-and-balloon grammar that would become standard in comic books. Animals, particularly the bucking horse drawn with exaggerated motion lines, dominate the action and drive the physical comedy central to the period's popular entertainment.