Ophelia

Dwiggins's *Ophelia* comic strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary of early newspaper comics: multiple characters scattered across the page, speech balloons carrying jokes and plot, and exaggerated character design. The strip features a cast of recurring types—a tiny character labeled "The Shit," figures labeled "Pip" and "Gint," and the central character Ophelia—engaged in overlapping gags about patching, flossing, and romantic mishaps. The chaotic page layout and hand-lettered signs were typical of Sunday comics of this era, before the regularized panel grid became standard. Such strips populated newspaper supplements in the 1910s, establishing recurring characters and visual humor as commercial properties that would directly influence the comic book format that emerged in the 1930s.