Percy

This Sunday strip follows Percy through nine panels of slapstick mishap. The character, rendered in bold outlines and dense cross-hatching, tumbles through escalating chaos—mechanical failures, collisions, and pratfalls that build toward physical comedy. The artist employs sequential panels with speech balloons to advance both gag and narrative, anchoring recurring characters in a continuous story world. By 1911, the Sunday newspaper comic had become a laboratory for visual storytelling: multiple tiers allow artists to pace action and reaction, while consistent character design across panels creates narrative momentum. Percy exemplifies how the comics page inherited theatrical timing and slapstick timing from vaudeville while developing distinctly visual means of humor—the frozen moment, the exaggerated pose, the collision rendered in lines.