Splinters by Steinigans

A Sunday comic strip featuring a man and a mischievous dog in a series of escalating disasters. The strip demonstrates the visual conventions that shaped early comics: sequential panels advancing a narrative, speech balloons capturing dialogue and thought, and a recurring duo whose interactions drive the humor. The dog's anarchic behavior—stealing a hat, disrupting a picnic, causing chaos with cattle—creates the slapstick momentum typical of newspaper strips from the 1910s. Steinigans uses varied panel layouts and dynamic line work to convey movement and emotion. Such strips, distributed nationally through syndication, established the comic strip as a distinct medium and provided the formal and narrative templates that would define comic books when they emerged as a commercial form in the 1930s.