Splinters

A Sunday newspaper strip by Steinigans featuring a man in a spotted outfit and his dog in a series of escalating gags. The narrative unfolds across eight panels: the man proposes an idea to his dog, they sit on a roof, he climbs a tall structure, and finally ends buried under a pile of objects—each panel advancing the joke through sequential action. The strip employs the visual conventions emerging in early newspaper comics: rectangular panels with borders, speech balloons, recurring characters, and physical slapstick resolved through panel-to-panel progression. This format, developed in newspaper dailies and Sunday pages of the 1890s-1910s, established the language of comics: the panel grid, dialogue integration, and character continuity that would define the medium through the twentieth century.