Pranks of the Fourpaws

Drawings by W.L. Wells with verses by C.P. McDonald, this Sunday strip follows a mischievous bear and its comic misadventures in a domestic setting. The six-panel layout employs speech balloons and sequential narration to build gags across frames—a visual language newspapers were perfecting in the early 1900s. Animal characters in human scenarios were popular fare in Sunday comics, allowing artists to explore slapstick and physical comedy. The strip exemplifies how newspaper comics developed the formal grammar of panel arrangement, dialogue integration, and recurring protagonists that would become the foundation of the modern comic book form.