A Picture Story With Just One Word

Cartoonist Tad's wordless strip demonstrates the visual economy of early newspaper comics. A well-dressed man repeatedly loses his footing around a small dog, tumbling through six panels of escalating chaos—from slipping on pavement to crashing through a door to landing atop a desk—before shouting "AWAY!" at his tormentor. The strip relies entirely on sequential imagery and physical comedy to tell its story, with the single word serving as punctuation rather than narrative necessity. This economy of language was central to the medium's development in daily and Sunday pages, where artists refined panel layout, body language, and sight gags to reach mass audiences across literacy levels.