From the exhibition
Mr. Jacki
· December 6, 1903

This Sunday strip follows a well-dressed gentleman through six sequential panels, each advancing a single narrative: a trip to the florist, domestic confusion, a messenger's arrival, and a final mishap in the snow. The strip employs the visual grammar now standard to comics—discrete panels, speech balloons, and a recurring protagonist whose expressions and postures drive the humor. By the early 1900s, newspaper Sunday pages had become laboratories for sequential art, where artists tested and refined the techniques that would define the medium: panel borders to mark time, dialogue integrated into images, and character continuity across installments. Mr. Jacki demonstrates how newspapers became the birthplace of comic storytelling itself.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain