Moving Pictures of Our National Pastime—The Umpire

A twelve-panel comic strip that uses baseball terminology and action to satirize an umpire's dramatic gestures and authority. Each panel labels a pose—'Sweeping Plate,' 'Ladies an' Gentlemen, Battree!,' 'Foul Strike—B. One'—treating the official's theatrical movements as a sequential performance. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comics' reliance on visual gags, recurring character types, and the grid-panel format that would define the medium. Silhouette-style ink work and expressive body language carry the humor across wordless action, a technique central to comics' birth in Sunday newspaper supplements.