Reg'lar Fellers

Gene Byrnes's *Reg'lar Fellers* follows a gang of city boys through pranks and street adventures. This Sunday strip demonstrates the visual conventions that shaped early comics: panel sequence, speech balloons, and recurring character types. The joke structure—Jimmy asking what nationality various tradesmen are, only to correctly identify "Central Americans"—relies on rapid-fire gags across four panels. Byrnes's loose linework and caricature style became influential in newspaper comics throughout the 1920s, when Sunday strips like this were the primary venue for sequential comic art before the comic book format emerged.