Ext-T-Tray!!

This Sunday comic strip demonstrates the visual language that newspaper comics inherited from earlier illustration traditions and refined into a new medium. Three sequential panels tell a gag: a street officer confronts a small figure about disturbing Mount Everett, then chases him through the second panel, and in the third panel the pursuer ends up on the ground while his quarry escapes. The strip uses speech balloons, varied panel composition, and exaggerated character poses to convey action and humor across the sequence. By 1912, such strips appeared regularly in Sunday supplements, reaching millions of readers and establishing the formal grammar—panel borders, dialogue placement, expressive linework—that would become foundational to comic books when they emerged as a distinct format in the following decades.