Fun or Torture for Dogs

Albert Payson Terhune's narrative comic strip tracks a boy's misadventure with firecrackers and his neighbor's puppy. The strip uses sequential panels with speech balloons to develop plot across multiple scenes—a visual method still central to comics. Terhune, best known for his dog stories, employed the newspaper Sunday page format to combine text-heavy storytelling with illustration, typical of 1920s strips that straddled literature and visual art. The work demonstrates how early comic narratives relied on reader patience for longer story arcs, distinct from later single-gag formats.