Tenderfoot Tim Didn't See the Joke at First

This Sunday comic strip follows Tenderfoot Tim through a classic Western misadventure. A cowboy convinces the naive newcomer that the sheriff is hunting him, prompting Tim to hide in a barrel while gunfire erupts around him. The strip demonstrates the visual storytelling techniques that defined early newspaper comics: sequential panel progression, speech balloons capturing rapid dialogue, and recurring character types drawn with exaggerated features. By the 1910s, Sunday newspaper pages had become laboratories for comic narrative, where artists developed the visual grammar—panel layouts, gutters, expression through caricature—that would form the foundation of the modern comic book medium.