James Montgomery Flagg — Sunday Comic Strip, 1912

This pen-and-ink Sunday page by illustrator James Montgomery Flagg depicts a social scene at a beach resort. Five fashionable figures occupy the composition across multiple vignettes—a visual structure inherited from sequential newspaper cartooning. Flagg's flowing line work and careful cross-hatching define the characters' clothing and expressions with the precision that made him a leading commercial illustrator of the era. The narrative, titled "Jealousy," turns on domestic comedy: a woman observes her rival in conversation with her husband, setting up the humorous tension typical of early twentieth-century newspaper strips. Such illustrated narratives, distributed through Sunday supplements nationwide, established the visual language—panels, character consistency, speech balloons—that would become the foundation of the comic book medium.