Pranks of the Fourpaws

A six-panel Sunday comic drawn by W. L. Wells with verses by C. P. McDonald, *Pranks of the Fourpaws* tells a continuous narrative across the page—a technique central to early newspaper comics. Here, a monkey tricks an elephant into retrieving a coin from water, then a tree, escalating to absurd consequences: the elephant is launched across the world. The strip employs the visual grammar that defined the form: sequential panels, speech balloons, exaggerated expressions, and recurring animal characters. Published in the *Chicago Tribune*, such Sunday pages were the direct precursor to the modern comic book, establishing how readers followed action and gags through panel-to-panel progression.