Their Only Child

This Sunday strip follows a wealthy couple and their small son through a dinner party, establishing humor through the child's disruptions and the parents' contrasting responses to his behavior. The strip employs sequential panel layout with speech balloons to advance narrative, showing the visual conventions that newspapers pioneered in the early 1900s. Recurring characters and domestic settings became staples of the Sunday funny pages, which served as direct ancestors to the comic book format. The strip's reliance on visual gags—the child's antics escalating through the evening—demonstrates how cartoonists used multiple panels to build comedic timing, a technique that would define comic book storytelling.