The Dog and the Flag

Albert Payson Terhune's *The Dog and the Flag* exemplifies the narrative Sunday comic strip of the 1920s. A single large illustration dominates the page, anchored by expository text below—a layout that bridges illustrated fiction and comic form. The strip's plot unfolds through speech balloons and dense narrative paragraphs: a boy's patriotic dog retrieves a flag from a passing car, prompting moral debate about duty and property. The visual grammar here—sequential dialogue, gestural drawing, the interplay of image and text—reflects how newspaper comics were still developing their syntax. Terhune, known for animal stories, uses the dog as protagonist, a device that would become central to comics. The strip ran in major papers nationwide, helping establish comics as regular Sunday features that drove newspaper circulation.