Tonky Talk

Al Posen's *Tonky Talk* strip exemplifies the Sunday comic format of the 1920s: four sequential panels with musical notation headers, speech balloons advancing a visual gag, and recurring child characters in domestic settings. The strip's humor derives from physical comedy and malapropism—a child's mishearing of adult speech. Drawn in the loose, expressive line-work typical of the era, the strip demonstrates how newspaper comics had evolved into a distinct medium with consistent characters, panel-to-panel continuity, and standardized layouts that would directly influence the emerging comic book industry.