Splinters

This comic strip by Steinigans follows a clown attempting to pack two puppies into a box—a simple premise that unfolds across eight panels with escalating physical comedy. The recurring clown character and small dogs generate gags through their resistance and escape. The strip employs the emerging visual language of newspaper comics: sequential panels, varied framing, and action conveyed through posture and exaggerated gesture rather than verbal explanation. By 1911, such strips had become standard Sunday newspaper fare, establishing the panel-based narrative structure that would define comic books. Steinigans uses minimal text, relying instead on the reader's ability to follow action across frames—a grammar borrowed from early motion pictures and refined by cartoonists working within tight newspaper deadlines.