ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Jerry on the Job

· May 31, 1917

Jerry on the Job
This Sunday strip follows Jerry, a young office worker navigating workplace misadventures across multiple panels. The narrative unfolds left to right, with speech balloons advancing plot and gags—Jerry schemes to avoid work, faces consequences, and lands in physical comedy. The strip employs the visual grammar that defined early newspaper comics: distinct panels, expressive character drawings, and sequential action. Jerry on the Job ran as a daily and Sunday feature, exemplifying the humor strips that filled newspapers in the 1910s. These recurring-character strips, appearing regularly in papers nationwide, established the template and visual language that would directly feed into the comic book medium when publishers began reprinting newspaper strips in pamphlet form in the 1930s.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain