Pups: A Drifting Dog Will Always Get Ashore Somehow

Steinigans's *Pups* follows a resourceful dog navigating water and land across eight sequential panels. The strip exemplifies early Sunday newspaper comics: outlined figures, naturalistic settings with architectural and landscape detail, and a narrative arc told through visual progression. Speech balloons anchor character dialogue; panel borders guide the reader's eye through the gag. The dog's repeated appearance across frames establishes continuity—a hallmark of comic-strip form that newspapers cultivated during this decade. Such strips, serialized in Sunday editions and dailies, became the direct precursor to the assembled comic book format and established visual conventions—sequential panel grammar, recurring characters, and tonal consistency—that remain foundational to the medium.