Their Only Child—He Does Enjoy Christmas!

This twelve-panel Sunday comic follows a small boy's Christmas morning through the eyes of doting parents. The strip uses sequential panels with speech balloons to track the child's destruction of presents and decorations, building to comic crescendo. The parents' expressions shift from joy to dismay as their son wrecks the tree, scatters gifts, and causes general chaos. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comics' family-centered humor and visual storytelling conventions—recurring characters, emotional continuity across panels, and escalating gags—that would become foundational to comic book form. Published in a major Midwestern paper, such strips were the primary venue for sequential art before comic books emerged as a distinct medium in the 1930s.