Sue to Lou—The Boss Believes in Signs

This newspaper comic strip demonstrates the visual conventions that emerged in early twentieth-century comics: multiple panels arranged left-to-right, speech balloons carrying dialogue, and a recurring cast of office workers. The gag turns on superstition and workplace hierarchy—an employee's mishaps throughout the day, read as bad omens by his superstitious boss, lead to his dismissal. The strip's economical linework and staging show how cartoonists of this era developed the language of sequential art, breaking narrative into discrete moments and using spatial arrangement to guide reader attention. Such dailies and Sunday pages in newspapers formed the commercial and artistic foundation from which the comic book medium would develop.