Carrie

Wood Cowan's Carrie follows a group of mischievous children on a motoring adventure. The strip demonstrates the visual economy of newspaper comics: simple line work, expressive faces, and sequential panels that guide readers through escalating chaos. Speech balloons and recurring characters—here, the kids and their vehicle—anchor the humor in familiar situations. By the 1920s, Sunday comics had become a laboratory for the formal grammar that would define comics: panel borders, gutters, and word-image relationships that creators like Cowan refined for mass audiences. Carrie exemplifies how newspaper strips trained both artists and readers in a new visual language before the comic book format emerged.