Pride Goeth Before a Fall; or, Premature Praise for Tidy Teddy

A six-panel Sunday strip tracking young Teddy's fall from grace. The boy receives lavish praise from his mother for his tidiness and good behavior, earning comparisons to model children. Yet each subsequent panel undermines this virtue: Teddy tracks mud indoors, creates chaos at bathtime, and ultimately lands in the dirt. The strip's sequential narrative—using panel progression to build comic irony—exemplifies how newspaper comics of this era employed visual storytelling conventions: distinct frames, speech balloons, and recurring child characters whose misadventures drove humor. These Sunday pages established the formal vocabulary that would structure comic books for decades to come.