Our Antediluvian Ancestors

This Sunday strip uses prehistoric domestic life as comedic frame. A husband questions his wife's tombstone portrait; she explains it commemorates her first husband's death—at no expense to her. The joke hinges on remarriage and thrift. The panel layout and speech balloons establish character interaction across sequential frames, while the exaggerated figures and crude setting were standard period vocabulary. Strips like this populated newspaper Sunday pages in the early twentieth century, establishing the visual and narrative conventions—recurring characters, sight gags, domestic situations—that would codify the modern comic strip and ultimately the comic book form.