Such Is Life by Dan Zelm

Dan Zelm's *Such Is Life* demonstrates the visual conventions established by newspaper comics in the early 1920s. The strip employs sequential panels with speech balloons to tell a joke about an Irish immigrant and his dog. A man asks about the dog's breed; learning it's an Irish Terrier, he questions why the owner doesn't make "friends" with women instead. The punchline—that Irish people "stick together"—unfolds across six panels in a steady, economical narrative flow. The cartoon style and recurring character types reflect the era's daily and Sunday newspaper strips, which trained readers in the visual grammar of comics: panel borders, word balloons, and character consistency across frames. These newspaper pages were the direct precursors to the comic book format that would emerge in the following decade.