Pranks of the Fourpaws

This Sunday comic strip follows a hunter and his dogs on a backwoods adventure. Drawings by W.L. Wells and verses by C.F. McDonald, the strip uses sequential panels and speech balloons to build narrative momentum across six frames. The hunter attempts to hunt bears with his pack, but the dogs prove unreliable allies—distracted, disobedient, and prone to their own schemes. The strip exemplifies the visual conventions emerging in early newspaper comics: action flows left to right, dialogue appears in balloons, and recurring characters (the exasperated hunter, the clever dogs) anchor the humor. Published during the formative years of the Sunday funnies, when newspapers discovered comics as a reliable circulation driver, *Pranks of the Fourpaws* demonstrates how artists were establishing the grammar of the medium that would evolve into the comic book.