The Gumps

Sidney Smith's *The Gumps* follows a middle-class family through domestic mishaps and motoring adventures. This Sunday page demonstrates the strip's narrative sophistication: six to twelve panels per page advance a continuous story across multiple tiers, with recurring characters—Andy and Min Gump, their son Chester—reacting to everyday crises with physical comedy and witty dialogue. Smith pioneered the use of panel borders, speech balloons, and sequential pacing that became foundational to comic strip grammar. Launched in 1917, *The Gumps* helped establish the newspaper comic as serialized narrative rather than gag sequence, directly influencing the visual and structural conventions that shaped the emerging comic book medium.