Terry and Tacks

Joe Farren's *Terry and Tacks* follows a young boy and his dog through domestic mishaps rendered in the visual language that newspaper comics pioneered. The strip employs sequential panels with speech balloons to convey gags through sight and dialogue—a grammar developed across the 1890s and 1900s by artists working in Sunday papers and dailies. Here, Terry's attempts to convince his parents of his honesty backfire into slapstick chaos, each panel advancing the narrative through spatial juxtaposition rather than text alone. By the 1910s, such recurring-character strips had become staples of American newspapers, establishing the formal conventions that would later define comic books themselves.