The Gumps

Sidney Smith's *The Gumps* follows a middle-class family through domestic comedy and small crises. Here, Andy's cake-baking mishap—three layers of chocolate with nuts—becomes a running gag across multiple panels. Smith's strip exemplifies the narrative sophistication of 1920s newspaper comics: sequential panels advance a coherent story, speech balloons carry naturalistic dialogue, and recurring characters develop through their reactions and choices. Published in newspapers nationwide, *The Gumps* helped establish the visual grammar that would define comic strips and, later, comic books—the panel grid, the speech balloon, the episodic yet interconnected storytelling that became fundamental to the medium.