Zimmie

Two owls perched on a branch discuss corn growth in this early newspaper comic strip. When one owl asks what made the corn grow, the other admits ignorance about which political party claims credit that year. The strip employs the visual conventions established by turn-of-the-century comic pages: recurring animal characters, speech balloons, and panel composition. Animal characters allowed cartoonists to comment obliquely on human affairs, a technique that became standard in the newspaper comics that ultimately shaped the medium of comic books itself.