The Pranks of Pantomime Pete

A silent-comedy strip featuring Pete, a mischievous character who communicates entirely through physical gesture and pantomime. Each panel shows Pete interacting with animals—donkeys, dogs, and oxen—in escalating comic situations: riding, being bucked off, being chased, and fleeing. The strip employs the newspaper Sunday page format with six sequential panels that build gags through visual action rather than dialogue. This strip exemplifies early comic art's reliance on slapstick and body language, predating sophisticated speech-balloon integration. The recurring character and panel-based narrative structure mark it as part of the foundational vocabulary newspapers and comic strips were establishing in the first decade of the twentieth century.