Percy

Percy, a Sunday newspaper strip of the early 1910s, follows its titular character through physical comedy and slapstick mishap. In this episode, Percy's mechanical schemes and bumbling adventures propel the narrative across nine panels, each advancing the gag through sequential action and dialogue. The strip employs the visual vocabulary established by newspaper comics: regular panel borders, speech balloons, and recurring character types. The artist uses exaggerated proportions and dynamic line work to convey motion and chaos. Sunday funnies like Percy served as the direct precursor to the comic book format, establishing the panel-based narrative structure and character serialization that would define the medium. Newspaper strips of this era trained both artists and readers in the grammar of visual storytelling that became fundamental to American comics.