The Important Mr. Peewee, the Great Little Man

This Sunday comic strip follows Mr. Peewee at a baby show, where he dispenses advice to parents while his own child wins prizes—a typical setup for early newspaper comics. The strip demonstrates the visual conventions that defined the medium: sequential panels, speech balloons containing dialogue and internal monologue, exaggerated character expressions, and recurring protagonists. By the 1900s, Sunday newspaper comics had become a major vehicle for visual storytelling, establishing the grammar of panel layout, pacing, and character development that would carry forward into comic books. Artists working in this era invented the formal language—the relationship between word and image, the control of time through panels—that shaped all sequential art to follow.