Splinters by Steinigans

A Sunday newspaper comic strip following a small dog's encounter with wealthy patrons. The six-panel narrative demonstrates early comic vocabulary: sequential panels advance the plot through visual and verbal jokes, speech balloons carry dialogue, and a recurring character—the scrappy protagonist—drives reader investment. Steinigans employs sharp contrasts between the dog's poverty and the dinner guests' affluence to build gags around class difference and appetite. The strip's layout, with consistent panel borders and integrated lettering, exemplifies the formal innovations that transformed newspaper comics into a distinct medium. Such strips were the primary laboratory where cartoonists developed the visual grammar that would define comic books.