Splinters

This Sunday strip by Steinigans follows a clown attempting to entertain a bridal couple at their wedding reception. The narrative unfolds across eight panels as the clown's antics with the wedding cake and a pack of dogs progressively escalate into chaos. The strip employs the sequential panel structure that newspapers had standardized by the 1910s, with each frame advancing the gag through physical comedy and visual progression. Recurring clown characters populated the funny pages of this era, drawing on circus and vaudeville tradition. The strip demonstrates how newspaper comics developed visual storytelling conventions—panel borders, figure placement, and spatial relationships—that would become foundational to comic book language.