Pinhead Pete

This daily strip features Pinhead Pete, a recurring character whose oversized head dominates the panel composition. The gag relies on a common complaint about rising living costs: when Pete mentions financial strain, his companions respond with physical violence—here, a figure strikes him with a lantern. The strip employs the visual vocabulary of early newspaper comics: a single panel with hand-lettered speech balloon, simple line work, and a punchline hinging on exaggeration and slapstick. Such comic strips, syndicated across hundreds of newspapers, established the formal language—recurring characters, dialogue balloons, sequential panels—that would define American comics.