Pranks of the Fourpaws

This Sunday page features animal characters—a hippopotamus, lion, tiger, giraffe, elephant, and rhinoceros—arranged in six panels with sequential narrative and dialogue. Each animal speaks in first person, describing a prank or complaint: the hippo's boastfulness about jungle hunts, the lion's mane troubles with children, the tiger's surprise at being dressed as a beggar, the giraffe's cart-pulling labor, the elephant's shelter and loneliness, and the rhino's burden. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comics' visual grammar: panel borders, speech balloons, pen-and-ink line work, and recurring character types. Published during the formative years of the Sunday funnies, *Pranks of the Fourpaws* demonstrates how animal casts allowed artists to explore humor through exaggeration and anthropomorphism while establishing the conventions that would define comic strip storytelling.