Splinters

This Sunday page by Steinigans follows a hapless character and his dog through a rabbit-hunting misadventure. The strip employs sequential panels with speech balloons to track physical comedy—the hunter repeatedly chasing rabbits through tall grass, pursued in turn by the dog, culminating in a collision with a mysterious figure called "the boss." The artwork relies on energetic line work and slapstick timing, hallmarks of early newspaper comic strips. By 1912, such strips had become standard Sunday fare, establishing the visual language—panel borders, word balloons, recurring characters—that would define the emerging comic book medium. Splinters exemplifies how daily and Sunday newspaper comics served as the technical and commercial laboratory for sequential art before becoming an industry in their own right.