Ophelia by Dwiggins

W.H. Dwiggins's *Ophelia* comic strip demonstrates the visual storytelling techniques that defined early newspaper comics. The strip employs multiple speech balloons, varied panel sizes, and expressive character design to move gags forward across the page. Here, Ophelia—a character inhabiting an imaginative domestic world—interacts with gadgets and devices while other figures comment on events through dialogue. The composition balances text and image, a grammar refined through Sunday supplement comics of the 1890s and early 1900s. Dwiggins's work exemplifies how newspaper comics became the laboratory for sequential art, developing visual conventions—panel borders, word balloons, recurring characters—that would structure the comic book medium emerging in subsequent decades.