Petey Dink

C. A. Voight's *Petey Dink* strips appeared in American newspapers during the 1910s-20s, following a mischievous child through physical comedy and domestic mishaps. This four-panel sequence demonstrates the visual conventions newspapers had standardized by the 1910s: sequential panels advancing a narrative, speech balloons containing dialogue, and consistent character design across frames. The strip's slapstick humor—a child tumbling from a car, a concerned adult's reaction, a mirror gag—relies on the visual grammar that newspaper comics had inherited from European comics and developed through artists working in daily strips. These Sunday and daily comic pages served as the immediate precursor to the comic books that would emerge in the 1930s, establishing both the formal language and publishing infrastructure that shaped the medium's birth.