Such Is Life

Dan Zelm's *Such Is Life* captures domestic comedy through the eyes of a young child questioning adult logic. Here, "Buddy" asks his mother why birds eat so little, only to learn they consume a peck at a time—a pun that hinges on the child's literal interpretation. The strip employs the visual conventions that defined newspaper comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, and a recurring cast bound by family relationships. Such humor, dependent on wordplay and the gap between childish understanding and adult explanation, sustained the daily comic strip as a staple of American newspapers throughout the early twentieth century.