The Cat and the Dachshunds

This newspaper comic strip by Staudinger demonstrates the visual conventions that defined early Sunday comics. Four sequential panels follow a cat's encounters with dachshunds and their owner, using exaggerated poses and physical comedy to drive the narrative. The strip employs multiple tiers to organize action, recurrent characters, and varied compositions within each panel—techniques essential to newspaper comics' visual grammar. Published in the Chicago Tribune during the medium's formative years, such strips established how cartoonists would use panel flow, character repetition, and dynamic staging to tell jokes and stories to a mass audience.