Such Is Life

Dan Zelm's *Such Is Life* strips the comedy bare: two children and a slide. The first panel announces the premise, the second shows Percival's wish—to experience the slide himself rather than merely observe. By the third panel, his idea has crystallized into action. The remaining panels play out the consequences: Percival sitting beneath the slide while his buddy slides overhead, then a confrontation about his method, and finally his justification that pretending to hear the noise of the slide was more fun than actually sliding. The strip's visual economy—simple figures, clear speech balloons, sequential logic—exemplifies the newspaper comic's narrative grammar. Recurring characters and their small misadventures were the building blocks of comic strip appeal, drawing readers back daily. Zelm's work belongs to the 1920s dailies that established the form's conventions before comic books began reprinting strips on pulp paper.