Such Is Life

Dan Zelm's daily strip follows a man and his dogs through ordinary moments of domestic life. The strip employs the visual conventions now standard to comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters. Here, the unnamed protagonist observes that a dog's simple routine—eating, sleeping, playing—constitutes a complete existence, then ironically catalogs his own day: watching children, barking at cars, arguing with the cat. The humor turns on the contrast between the man's busy life and the dog's contentment. Such Is Life exemplifies the newspaper comic strip as it emerged in the early twentieth century, a form that taught readers to follow narrative through panel sequence and character expression, laying groundwork for the comic book medium to follow.