Abie the Agent

This Sunday strip follows Abie, a young Jewish immigrant working as a real estate agent, through schemes and misunderstandings with landlords, tenants, and friends. The narrative unfolds across seven panels using speech balloons and sequential action—visual conventions that shaped early comic art. Abie the Agent ran in newspapers from 1911 to 1937, part of the immigrant humor comics that dominated the Sunday pages. Artist Ham Fisher developed the strip's dialect-driven comedy and character-driven plots, establishing templates for situation comedy in comics that influenced generations of newspaper strips and contributed to the visual language comics inherited from the medium's origins in the 1890s.