Splinters

Splinters follows a cast of animal characters—scrappy dogs and other creatures—through domestic and working-class mishaps. In this strip, a dog causes coal to scatter, leading to a fireside gathering where the characters trade quips about luck and the pleasures of a warm hearth. The six-panel layout uses speech balloons and sequential action to build comedic situations, a visual vocabulary inherited from early newspaper strips. Drawn in the sketch-based style characteristic of the 1910s funny pages, Splinters exemplifies how humor comics populated Sunday supplements, establishing conventions—recurring characters, panel-to-panel narrative, readable expressions—that would become fundamental to the emerging comic book form.