Petey Dink

C. A. Voight's *Petey Dink* strip follows a young boy navigating mishaps in water and on shore. In this sequence, Petey calls for help while swimming, alarming onlookers—only to reveal the crisis is something mundane. The strip employs the visual vocabulary standard to newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, a recurring child protagonist, and physical comedy. Published in the era when newspaper Sunday and daily strips established the grammar of sequential art, *Petey Dink* represents the popular humor strips that preceded and directly influenced the emergence of comic books in the 1930s. These strips trained readers in panel-to-panel narrative and established the commercial viability of illustrated serials.