Splinters

This Sunday strip by Steinigans follows a gnome character and his dog through a six-panel narrative of mischief and consequence. The gnome's scheme to force the pups to play a brisk game spirals into chaos—they scatter across snowy terrain, wreak havoc indoors, and ultimately land the gnome in hot water with an angry householder. Steinigans employs sequential panels with speech balloons, establishing clear cause-and-effect storytelling. The strip's comic timing relies on visual gags: the gnome's exaggerated poses, the dogs' anarchic energy, and escalating domestic disaster. This format—narrative progression across multiple panels with recurring characters—was the visual vocabulary newspapers had adopted from the 1890s onward, the foundational grammar that would define comic strips and eventually comic books.