Splinters by Steinigans

A Sunday page featuring two pups whose owner attempts to teach them music. The strip employs the visual conventions developed in early newspaper comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, and anthropomorphized animal characters whose physical comedy drives the narrative. As the lesson progresses, the dogs' cacophonous playing escalates into chaos across nine panels, culminating in their expulsion. Steinigans uses repetition and exaggerated poses to convey motion and sound, techniques that became foundational to comic art. Such animal-centered humor strips were staples of the Sunday newspaper pages that, alongside daily continuities, established the grammar and commercial framework from which the comic book medium emerged.