From the exhibition
Old Opie Dilldock's Stories
· May 19, 1907

This Sunday page strips narrative into seven sequential panels, each advancing a tall-tale adventure in a jungle setting. The protagonist, a diminutive character in a bowler hat, encounters oversized fauna—lions, tigers, bizarre creatures—in increasingly absurd predicaments. Speech balloons carry the first-person narration and dialogue throughout. The densely crosshatched pen work renders foliage and animal anatomy with period-specific detail. As part of early newspaper comics, such strips established the visual grammar of panel progression, recurring characters, and word-image integration that became foundational to comic art. The format exemplifies how Sunday supplements serialized humor narratives, training readers to follow sequential pictures as a unified story rather than isolated gags.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain