Their Only Child—Some People Are Almost Inhuman

A multi-panel domestic comedy from the Sunday newspaper comics, tracking the misadventures of a young child and exasperated parents. The strip employs the visual conventions established by early newspaper cartoonists: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and sight gags that build across the page. By 1914, Sunday comic sections had become standard features in American dailies, providing serialized humor that kept readers returning. These newspaper strips pioneered the visual grammar—panel borders, word balloons, expressive linework—that would define the emerging comic book medium. The humor relies on physical comedy and character types recognizable to contemporary readers.