Ophelia and Her Slate

By Dwiggins, this Sunday comic strip follows the mischievous Ophelia through a chaotic day at school. The artist employs multiple overlapping panels and sight gags—a birdcage collision, a runaway ink bottle, scattered pupils—rendered in loose, expressive linework typical of early newspaper comics. Speech balloons carry Ophelia's rapid-fire commentary and other characters' reactions across the crowded composition. The strip exemplifies how Sunday pages of this era broke free from sequential grid layouts, instead filling the space with dynamic action and visual gags that required active eye-scanning by readers. This visual inventiveness, born from newspaper constraints and competition, established foundational grammar later adopted by comic books: recurring characters, recurring settings, and the energetic integration of text and image.