Salesman Sam

A Sunday newspaper strip featuring Sam, a traveling salesman, and his encounters with animals and mishaps. The strip employs sequential panel layout with speech balloons to advance gags across six frames. Sam's exaggerated expressions and slapstick collisions with a rhinoceros, zebra, and other creatures drive the humor. By the 1920s, newspaper comics had become a dominant form of visual storytelling, establishing conventions—bordered panels, lettered dialogue, recurring protagonists—that directly shaped the emerging comic book medium. Daily and Sunday strips like this one trained readers in the grammar of sequential art and proved the commercial viability of character-driven humor.