Splinters by Steinigans

This Sunday strip follows a young boy and his goat through a series of escalating mishaps. The narrative unfolds across eight panels: a sign advertises the goat's availability, chaos erupts at a clothing store, the animal flees through town creating pandemonium, and finally the exasperated boy pursues it through residential streets. Steinigans employs the visual vocabulary that emerged from newspaper comics in the early 1900s—sequential panels advancing a narrative, speech balloons containing dialogue, and repeated character types. The strip demonstrates how daily and Sunday newspaper comics had become a primary venue for visual storytelling, establishing conventions that would form the foundation of the comic book medium. The anarchic humor and physical gags typical of the era drove circulation numbers and made comic strips essential newspaper features.