Goops! by Gelett Burgess

Gelett Burgess's *Goops!* strips feature round-headed child characters demonstrating table manners and social etiquette through comic misbehavior. This page shows six narrative sequences with titles like "Don't be a Good!" and "Ladies First!"—each panel depicting the Goops violating social convention, the humor derived from their crude behavior and their exaggerated adult reactions. Burgess helped establish the visual language of comics: regular panel grids, speech balloons, and recurring characters in recurring scenarios. By the 1920s, the Sunday newspaper page had become the primary venue for developing sequential narrative art, with strips like this teaching children behavioral norms while entertaining adults. The Goops embody an era when comics served both entertainment and didactic purposes, delivered through the mass medium of the Sunday supplement.