SAM—He Laughs!

This comic strip follows Sam through a laboratory mishap. A character in a patterned suit arrives at Prof. King's Chemistry Laboratory seeking help with a sweeping job, only to become entangled in an experiment. The strip's six panels use sequential art to build narrative tension: the helper enters, confusion escalates, an explosion erupts across the page in dynamic radiating lines, and the aftermath leaves characters stunned by the results. The strip employs the visual vocabulary developing in early newspaper comics—speech balloons, exaggerated expressions, and panel-to-panel continuity—techniques pioneered by cartoonists creating daily and Sunday pages in the 1890s and 1900s. These serialized strips in American newspapers established the formal grammar that would define comic books for generations to come.