Anything for an Excuse

This Sunday strip by Clare Briggs follows a man's escalating fabrications to escape a baseball game. Each panel builds the deception—from a dead friend to military campaigns to Chinese holidays—until he's caught in absurd contradiction. Briggs employs the visual conventions that defined early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, repeated characters, and escalating gags. The strip's humor depends on readers' familiarity with a protagonist they'd see weekly, establishing the model for newspaper comic strips as serialized entertainment that would eventually feed the emerging comic book medium.