The Puppy and the Stationery Firepaper / Our Own Solomon

These newspaper Sunday pages showcase the visual innovations that defined early comics. The top strip follows a puppy's misadventures through sequential panels with speech balloons, establishing narrative flow through image and text. Below, 'Our Own Solomon' employs multiple tiers and mixing of spot illustrations with prose, reflecting the hybrid format of turn-of-the-century funny pages. Artists working in this period—roughly 1900–1910—were establishing the formal grammar of the medium: bordered panels advancing time, characters recurring across installments, and the marriage of captions and dialogue. These pages appeared in newspapers nationwide, reaching millions daily and forming the visual vocabulary that would become the comic book.