Comic Strip Pages, Early 1900s

These newspaper pages show the visual innovations that established comics as a distinct medium. The upper strips employ sequential panels, speech balloons, and sight gags to build narrative momentum—a vocabulary still used today. "Training for the High Jump" and "Tabby Passes Bobby the Honey" use repeated characters and escalating action to generate humor. Below, "Our Own Solomon" shifts to a different format: circular vignettes containing character monologues paired with portraits. Both approaches—action-driven strips and character-based commentary—competed in Sunday supplements and dailies during the medium's formative years, when newspaper comics pages became the direct precursor to the comic book.