Pranks of the Fourpaws

This Sunday comic strip follows a cast of animal characters—elephants, tigers, monkeys, hippos, and kangaroos—through a sequence of slapstick pranks and tricks. Each panel advances a narrative arc across six frames, using speech balloons to convey dialogue and interior monologue. The animals speak, scheme, and react in recognizably human ways, a convention that defined early newspaper comics. The pen-and-ink drawings employ cross-hatching and energetic linework typical of the period. Drawn by W.L. Wells with verses by C.F. McDonald, this strip exemplifies how the Sunday newspaper page became a laboratory for sequential art, establishing the visual grammar of comics—panel borders, continuous characters, and integrated text—that would structure the medium for decades.