Hawkshaw the Detective — Stratagems and Sneezes

A Sunday comic strip featuring Hawkshaw the Detective and supporting characters in two sequential stories. The top strip shows Hawkshaw orchestrating an elaborate ruse involving Colonel, a Miller, and sneeze powder to catch a criminal—relying on physical comedy and wordplay across six panels. The bottom strip, "The Newlyweds," depicts domestic humor with young parents and their baby, Snookums, managing household mishaps. Both strips employ the visual vocabulary established in early newspaper comics: regular panel grids, speech balloons, recurring characters, and sight gags. This page exemplifies the Sunday supplement format that dominated American newspapers in the early twentieth century and directly influenced the development of the comic book as a narrative medium.