Petey Dink by C.A. Voight

This Sunday strip follows Petey Dink through a seaside adventure, employing the sequential panel structure and speech balloons that defined early newspaper comics. Voight's loose, energetic line work captures physical comedy across four frames—the gag builds from beach conversation through slapstick action to a final punchline. By the 1910s, such strips appeared in Sunday rotogravure sections nationwide, reaching millions of readers. The recurring character, episodic format, and visual storytelling techniques pioneered in daily and Sunday newspapers directly shaped the comic book medium that would emerge in the 1930s. These strips were the laboratory where artists developed the grammar of sequential art.