Pranks of the Fourpaws

A six-panel Sunday strip featuring two mischievous bears who steal a wagon of groceries from an unsuspecting man. Drawn by W. L. Wells with verses by G. F. McDonald, the strip uses sequential panels and speech balloons to build narrative momentum from setup through comic payoff. The bears' dialogue and the man's escalating misfortune drive the humor across the page. Published in the early decades of newspaper comics, when Sunday strips served as laboratories for visual storytelling—panel borders, word balloons, and recurring animal characters became the formal language that would define the medium for generations.