Alexander Smart, ESC. / Elmer

This Sunday comic section presents two strips typical of 1920s newspaper humor. *Alexander Smart, ESC.* (top) follows the misadventures of its title character through dialogue-heavy panels, while *Elmer* (bottom) depicts a child's efforts to obtain Christmas gifts through increasingly frantic schemes. Both strips employ the visual conventions established by earlier newspaper comics: regular panel grids, speech balloons, and recurring characters that allowed readers to follow continuing stories across daily and weekly installments. By the 1920s, the Sunday comic section had become standard in major newspapers, generating the visual and narrative vocabulary that would define comic books when they emerged as a distinct medium in the following decade.