Spareribs and Gravy

This Sunday comic strip follows two characters who encounter a live bear on an ice floe—a premise that drives rapid-fire gags across six panels. The artist employs the emerging visual vocabulary of newspaper comics: clearly delineated panels, speech balloons carrying dialogue and reaction, and sequential action that propels readers through the narrative. Recurring characters and episodic adventure were hallmarks of early 1900s Sunday pages, which appeared in major newspapers nationwide. Such strips helped establish the formal language that would define comic books: the panel as a unit of time and space, the balloon as a carrier of character voice, and the strip as a vehicle for humor grounded in visual storytelling rather than text alone.