Before the Flood

This Sunday comic strip exemplifies the visual storytelling conventions that shaped early newspaper comics. Multiple panels with speech balloons advance narrative gags across the page, featuring recurring characters in exaggerated caricature style. The strip's layout—mixing large and small panels with varied compositions—demonstrates how artists of this era adapted theatrical staging and sequential illustration to the comics page. Sunday strips like this reached millions of readers and established the formal language of comic art: the panel grid, word balloons, visual gags tied to dialogue, and character-driven humor that would define the medium for generations.