Crazy Corner (Mr. Wad)

This six-panel comic strip follows Mr. Wad through an evening mishap. After his wife urges him to fix the furnace, Wad discovers the pilot light extinguished. Each panel advances the gag through sequential action: his failed attempts to relight it, the growing concern of onlookers, and the punchline resolution. The strip employs the visual conventions now standard to newspaper comics—speech balloons, panel gutters marking time, and a recurring character in domestic situations. By the 1910s, these Sunday and daily strips had become the primary laboratory for visual storytelling, establishing the grammar that would define the emerging medium of comic books.