Splinters

This Sunday strip by Steinigans follows a familiar early-comics plot: a character attempts to construct a house for dogs, only to have the animals destroy or reject the finished product. Across eight panels, the strip demonstrates the visual language now standard to newspaper comics—uniform panel grids, speech balloons, sequential action, and a recurring cast. The humor depends on physical comedy and character stubbornness: as the pup owner builds, the dogs scatter and interfere, then refuse to occupy the completed structure. The loose, energetic line work and reliance on sight gags over dialogue typified Sunday-page humor of the 1910s, when newspaper strips were already establishing themselves as the foundation of comic-strip narrative and visual structure.