Abie the Agent

This Sunday strip follows Abie, a hustling New York agent, as he attempts to solve his neighbor's marital troubles. The strip employs the visual conventions pioneered in early newspaper comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters in everyday domestic settings. The rapid-fire dialogue and physical comedy typify the humor of the dailies and Sunday pages that established the visual grammar of sequential art. Abie the Agent ran during the formative years when comic strips in newspapers became the precursor to the comic book industry, demonstrating how artists developed ways to convey action, emotion, and comic timing through panel progression and illustration.