Pups: Never Start Rolling Things You Can't Stop

This Sunday comic strip by Steinigans follows a sequence of puppies setting a snowball in motion down a snowy slope. Each panel tracks the expanding consequences as the rolling mass grows larger, gathering more dogs and debris. The strip demonstrates early newspaper comics' visual storytelling: sequential panels arranged in a grid, wordless narrative conveyed through action and scale, and recurring characters in a single gag premise. By 1910, the Sunday supplement pages had established the formal vocabulary—bordered panels, continuous action across frames, captions and speech balloons—that would define the emerging medium. Such strips appeared in major newspapers nationwide, reaching millions of readers and establishing the visual language that would eventually become the comic book format.