Pups: Listeners Sometimes Hear Unpleasant Things

This strip by Steinigans uses a megaphone-as-loudspeaker device to build its joke across eight panels. A dog hears increasingly unflattering remarks about itself through the horn, reacting with growing distress—from curiosity to alarm to defeat. The sequential art employs consistent framing, expressive linework, and wordless action to convey emotional escalation. Newspaper comic strips of this era were laboratories for visual storytelling, developing the fundamental grammar of sequential art: repeated characters, panel borders as narrative structure, and the marriage of image and text. Sunday pages and dailies reached millions and established conventions that would define comic books for decades.