You Can't Lose Him

This Sunday strip by Clare Briggs follows a small boy's attempts to convince his father to engage in various activities—baseball, trading cards, football, golf, automobiles, and railroads. Each panel shows the father preoccupied with newspapers while the boy makes increasingly animated pitches. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comic construction: multiple panels arranged in a grid, speech balloons advancing narrative and humor, and a recurring child character as comic protagonist. Briggs's precise pen linework and the strip's reliance on visual exaggeration and domestic situation comedy were hallmarks of Sunday supplements in the 1900s, establishing conventions that defined the medium's formal language.