Nobody

This comic strip demonstrates the visual syntax that newspaper cartoonists developed in the early 1900s: multiple panels arranged vertically to show cause and effect, speech balloons indicating dialogue, and repeated character types to carry a gag across scenes. The strip shows someone causing chaos and a crowd asking "Who is hurt?" — only to receive the deflating answer "Nobody!!" The artist uses exaggerated body language and facial expression within bordered panels to tell the story, a grammar inherited from sequential illustration and refined by daily newspaper publication. By 1912, such strips appeared alongside prose and advertising in Sunday and weekday editions, establishing visual conventions that would become foundational to comic books when they emerged two decades later.