Splinters by Steinigans

A six-panel Sunday strip featuring a mischievous elf character and animals in slapstick situations. The gnome gets paint on his hands, wipes them on a pup, then tosses a shoe at the dog—triggering a cascade of chaos. The final panels show the elf laughing while surrounded by the mess he's created. Steinigans employs sequential art conventions—consistent characters across panels, speech balloons, sight gags building toward a punchline—that were standard in early newspaper comics. The strip exemplifies how Sunday supplements of the 1910s developed the visual language and recurring-character format that became foundational to American comic strips and later comic books.