A Little Child Shall Lead Them

Albert Payson Terhune's Sunday strip combines narrative prose with sequential art—a hybrid form common to newspaper comics of the 1920s. The story unfolds across multiple panels showing a child, her parents, and a large dog, with substantial text blocks anchoring plot developments. The pen-and-ink illustration style renders domestic scenes and animal detail with precision. This format, bridging illustrated story and visual narrative, represents the transitional moment between prose fiction and the fully visual comic strip language that would crystallize in subsequent decades. Newspaper Sunday pages like this served as laboratories where artists experimented with panel layout, speech balloons, and character continuity—formal innovations foundational to the emerging medium of comic books.