The Geevum Girls

Tim Early's *Geevum Girls* strip tracks the domestic schemes of two young women sharing an apartment. Here, one warns her roommate that a detective is coming—a setup for physical comedy when the suspect hides under the sofa. The strip uses sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters to build a rapid-fire gag. By the 1910s, newspaper comics had crystallized the visual language later adopted by comic books: panel borders to segment action, word balloons for dialogue, and character types audiences would recognize week to week. Daily strips like this one, appearing in newspapers nationwide, established the grammar of comics before the first pulp magazines appeared.