Signs of Spring (The Fourth Sign)

This comic strip follows a young man through the season's romantic stirrings, tracking his distraction from work through daydreaming, spring cleaning, and eventual pursuit of a girl on the street. The six-panel sequence demonstrates the visual vocabulary becoming standard in newspaper comics: speech balloons, sequential panel progression, and recurring character expressions that convey emotion and narrative momentum. Published in the Sunday pages, strips like this established the grammar of comics—discrete panels arranged to guide reader attention and control pacing—that would define the medium for decades. The strip's humor derives from visual gags and situation rather than text alone, marking the emergence of comics as a distinct narrative form.