Buddy Tucker and Alice of Wonderland: They Visit the Rat

This Sunday strip follows young Buddy Tucker and Alice through a visit to a rat's home, reciting the cumulative nursery rhyme "This Is the Rat That Ate the Malt." The artist uses the full newspaper page format to establish locale through architectural detail, employs sequential panels to show narrative progression, and relies on speech balloons to carry both exposition and gags. Recurring child characters drive the action across multiple panels, a structural approach that became fundamental to comic strip design. The strip demonstrates how early twentieth-century newspaper comics synthesized visual storytelling conventions—panel borders, character continuity, and dialogue placement—that would define the emerging medium.