Splinters by Steinigans

This Sunday page exemplifies the visual conventions that emerged from early newspaper comics. Steinigans employs six panels to track a simple narrative: a man loses his hat, attempts recovery, and encounters increasingly chaotic interference from dogs and other figures. Speech balloons and sequential panel arrangement guide readers through cause-and-effect logic. The recurring cast—the harried protagonist, the mischievous dogs—typified the character-driven humor of the newspaper funny pages, which provided both daily entertainment and the direct precursor to the comic book format. Such strips trained audiences in reading comics' visual grammar while appearing alongside sports, weather, and classified ads in mass-circulation papers.