The Gumps

A pioneering domestic comedy strip following the everyday misadventures of an American family. The strip employs multi-panel layouts with speech balloons to narrate episodic household problems—a sick child, home remedies, medical visits—building humor through dialogue and situational complications across six or nine panels per page. The Gumps exemplified the newspaper Sunday comic's formula: recurring characters in familiar settings, slapstick and verbal gags, and sequential art that established visual conventions the comic book medium would inherit. This format—panels advancing narrative time, characters reacting across frames—became the foundational grammar of comics as an art form.