How They Make Love on the Stage

This Sunday comic strip satirizes theatrical melodrama through visual slapstick. The narrative follows Frank and Lottie through escalating physical comedy—tumbles, chases, collisions—that parody overwrought stage conventions. The strip demonstrates the formal innovations emerging in early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and sight gags orchestrated across multiple acts. Published when Sunday comics were establishing themselves as a distinct medium, the strip employs the visual vocabulary—panel borders, gesture, scale variation—that newspapers and cartoonists were rapidly codifying into a new narrative language.