The Price of Patriotism

This Sunday strip tracks a single character's emotional arc across a day, from morning enthusiasm through afternoon fatigue to evening collapse. The top tier shows "Going in" at 10 a.m.—citizens arriving alert and energized; the middle tier depicts "Coming out" at 5 p.m.—the same figures now exhausted and depleted. Lower panels detail the hourly degradation, while ancillary gags mock patriotic fervor, political speeches, and public demonstrations. The strip's structural innovation—sequential time stamps and parallel panels showing before/after contrast—demonstrates how newspaper comics were developing visual grammar to convey narrative progression and causality across space.