From the exhibition
Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo
· December 25, 1904

This Sunday newspaper strip employs a visual conceit central to early comic art: panels designed to be read both right-side up and upside down, each orientation revealing a different narrative. The strip follows Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo through a snowy landscape, with speech balloons and sequential panels that guide readers through gags tied to the strip's dual-perspective format. The artwork uses bold line work and high contrast to structure space across six frames, establishing visual continuity while exploiting the newspaper page's physical properties. Such formal experiments were hallmarks of the Sunday comics era, when artists stretched the boundaries of panel layout and visual storytelling to create effects impossible in prose fiction.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain