Their Only Child

This Sunday comic strip from the *Washington Post* follows a child's single-minded devotion to music through twelve sequential panels. The narrative unfolds across domestic and outdoor scenes, tracking the protagonist's attempts to play instruments—horn, drum, violin—while exasperated adults react to the noise. The strip employs the visual conventions that defined early newspaper comics: panel borders, speech balloons, and a recurring child character driving the gags. Published during the golden age of Sunday supplement comics, when newspaper strips established the visual grammar that would define the medium—sequential panels showing cause and effect, expressive caricature, and timing built through panel-to-panel progression. The strip's humor relies on the clash between adult expectations and childish persistence.