The Gumps

Sidney Smith's *The Gumps* follows the domestic misadventures of an American family navigating marriage, fashion, and social propriety. This Sunday page demonstrates the visual conventions that shaped comic strips: bordered panels, speech balloons, recurring characters, and visual gags arranged for narrative flow. The lower strip, *Old Doc Yak*, shows how newspapers stacked multiple features on a single page. Published in Sunday comics sections across America, strips like *The Gumps* established the sequential art language that became foundational to comic books—panel transitions, character consistency, and comedy timing through image and text working together.