And Teddy (Roosevelt) Comes Marching Home

This political cartoon by Eugene Zimmerman depicts Theodore Roosevelt's return from the Spanish-American War, riding an elephant while leading a parade of figures. The composition employs the visual strategies developing in newspaper comics: multiple scenes across the page, exaggerated character expressions, and sequential action. As Sunday newspaper pages expanded in the 1890s, cartoonists like Zimmerman pioneered the visual language of comics: recurring characters, speech balloons, and panel arrangements that would define the medium's grammar for generations.