Pups: You Never Can Tell Where a Dog's Head Is

Steinigans' *Pups* uses sequential panels to show a dog's elaborate escape from a barrel of household goods. Across eight frames, the dog contorts through increasingly impossible positions—emerging backward, upside-down, twisted—each panel building on the last to create visual comedy through body language and spatial disruption. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comics' reliance on slapstick wordplay paired with expressive line work. By the early 1900s, Sunday comic supplements had become mass-market vehicles for artists developing the grammar of panel sequence, speech balloons, and recurring characters that would define the medium. *Pups* demonstrates how sequential art could sustain a gag across multiple frames, a technique fundamental to comic storytelling.