The Man with a Drag

Clare Briggs's six-panel strip follows a man hauled through town by what appears to be a woman in dark clothing, drawing crowds and escalating chaos. The narrative unfolds through sequential panels with speech balloons, establishing a visual grammar that would become standard in comics: action escalates panel to panel, dialogue advances the gag, and character expression drives the humor. Briggs, working in early newspaper comics, helped establish the formal conventions—panel borders, word balloons, sight gags distributed across a grid—that transformed newspaper strips into a distinct medium. By the 1910s, these Sunday and daily page formats had become the primary laboratory for visual storytelling that would define comic books.