The Gumps

Sidney Smith's *The Gumps* follows a middle-class family through domestic life, here depicting a dinner-table lecture on table manners and etiquette. The strip employs sequential panels with speech balloons to advance a narrative across a full Sunday page—visual conventions that became foundational to comic art. Published in newspapers nationwide, *The Gumps* demonstrated how recurring characters and everyday situations could sustain reader interest daily, establishing the template for the comic strip as a distinct medium and paving the way for the comic book industry that would emerge decades later.