Our Antediluvian Ancestors

F. Opper's Sunday comic strip depicts prehistoric family life through comedy. A mother summons a doctor for a child's pain while others engage in domestic tasks around stone dwellings. Speech balloons carry the gags—a doctor's prescription humor, a mother's exasperation—establishing character voices across sequential panels. The strip employs the visual conventions pioneered in early newspaper comics: panel borders, expressive line work, and recurring cast members in ongoing situations. By 1916, Sunday strips like this were standard features in American newspapers, combining illustration with narrative sequence to create humor through both image and text—the foundational grammar that would shape comic books for generations.