The Nine Lives of Kitty Kat

Frederick White's The Nine Lives of Kitty Kat exemplifies the narrative humor strip that dominated early newspaper comics. This episode—"Another Life Gone, But Seven More To Live!"—follows the cat's miraculous survival after drowning in a well, then near-death by dog attack. White employs the visual conventions now standard to comics: sequential panels, expressive line drawings, speech balloons delivering character voice, and a recurring protagonist with consistent personality. The cat's sardonic commentary on its own mortality and feline nature anchors the humor. Published in newspapers as a weekly or serial feature, such strips trained readers in the grammar of sequential art and established the episodic format that would define twentieth-century comic storytelling.