Ratty Stands Guard for Algy

This newspaper comic strip demonstrates the visual conventions emerging in early-twentieth-century sequential art: bordered panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters in escalating physical comedy. The narrative follows a simple premise—a sentry's instructions mistaken by his relief—through six panels of slapstick action. The crosshatched pen-and-ink style and caricatured figures typify the dailies and Sunday pages that preceded the modern comic book, establishing the panel-based storytelling and character continuity that became foundational to the medium. Newspaper strips like this one trained readers in decoding sequential visual narrative and provided the template for commercial comics to follow.