From the exhibition
Korrect Konduct for Kitty Kats
· 1912

This Sunday newspaper strip features two anthropomorphic kittens balanced on a seesaw, illustrating a moral lesson through visual wordplay. The comic employs the conventions already standard in early newspaper comics: distinct panel composition, expressive character design, and a didactic rhyming verse anchoring the humor. The strip exemplifies how Sunday papers serialized recurring animal characters—here the kittens appear to be established figures—in short comic narratives that combined entertainment with instruction. Published in an era when newspaper comics were the primary sequential art medium, before comic books as bound publications existed, such strips demonstrated the visual grammar (sequential panels, character consistency, speech integration) that would define the medium for decades to come.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain