Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo

A Sunday newspaper comic strip featuring Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, characters who venture into fantastical situations involving a giant clam and snake. The strip employs sequential narrative panels with speech balloons to advance its plot—a visual grammar that became foundational to comic art. Each panel builds on the last, using scale shifts and impossible scenarios for humor. Published in the New York Herald, this strip exemplifies the Sunday supplement comics that emerged in the 1890s, when newspapers discovered that serialized cartoon narratives with recurring characters could drive circulation. The strip's inventive panel layouts and visual storytelling helped establish conventions that would define twentieth-century comics.