Splinters by Steinigans

This Sunday comic strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary that emerged from newspaper comics in the early twentieth century. Six panels follow a simple premise: a man attempts to steal eggs from a henhouse, only to face escalating chaos as birds attack and multiply. Steinigans uses sequential panels with speech balloons and sight gags—a vocabulary inherited from nineteenth-century newspaper illustration but refined into narrative form. The strip's economy of line and exaggerated character action typify the period's approach to humor comics, where repetitive situations and animal characters provided dependable entertainment for newspaper readers seeking brief, visual comedy.