Obliged with a Bite

A four-panel comedy strip using sequential narrative to build a joke. A man visits a house seeking the gentleman of the residence; told he's out, the visitor offers to oblige by biting the servant instead. The final panel shows the man attacked by a dog. The strip employs the visual conventions that became standard in newspaper comics: uniform rectangular panels, speech balloons for dialogue, and exaggerated line work. These formal elements—developed by pioneers in the Sunday newspaper pages—created a visual language that made rapid storytelling possible. Strips like this, which appeared in daily and Sunday papers, directly preceded the bound collections that became early comic books.