Splinters

This Sunday comic strip by Steinigans follows a clown character and his persistent pups through a wordless narrative of escalating chaos. The clown attempts to prevent the dogs from following him by hiding inside stacked boxes, then a soap crate, and finally suspending himself from a rope—each panel a variation on the same gag. The strip demonstrates the visual storytelling conventions that newspaper comics pioneered: sequential panels advancing a simple premise, expressive character acting conveyed through body language and minimal dialogue, and the recurring cast essential to building reader loyalty. Such Sunday pages, appearing alongside daily strips in newspapers from the 1890s onward, established the fundamental grammar of comics that would define the medium as it evolved into the comic book form.