Their Only Child

This Sunday comic strip follows a single narrative across twelve panels, tracking a child's escalating mischief and the parents' mounting exasperation. The strip employs the visual grammar now standard to comics: rectangular panels arranged in rows, speech balloons anchored to speakers, and sequential action that unfolds left-to-right. The recurring family unit—parents and their unruly offspring—anchors the gag structure. The artist uses physical comedy and domestic chaos to generate humor, with the child's destructive energy the comic engine. By 1913, Sunday newspaper comics had become essential entertainment, with artists establishing the panel-based vocabulary that would define the medium for decades. This strip demonstrates how newspaper comics adapted theatrical timing and vaudeville's physical comedy to the printed page.