Spareribs and Gravy

This Sunday strip follows a domestic comedy of errors involving a flooded kitchen and a couple's failed attempt to salvage dinner. The six-panel layout uses overlapping silhouettes and expressive line work typical of early newspaper comics, with speech balloons advancing both plot and character voice. The strip deploys visual slapstick—water damage, ruined food, escalating chaos—as its primary humor engine, relying on readers' familiarity with domestic mishap as comedy. By 1913, newspaper comics had established the formal vocabulary of panel sequence, recurring domestic characters, and sequential gag structure that would become foundational to comic books. The strip exemplifies how Sunday pages served as laboratories for visual storytelling before the medium migrated to bound anthologies.