Salesman Sam

Salesman Sam follows the daily misadventures of its titular traveling salesman as he hawks his wares and stumbles through various schemes. In this strip, Sam's pitch for cigars goes hilariously wrong when a box misfires, sending him into chaos. The six-panel sequence demonstrates the visual storytelling conventions that shaped early comics: sequential panels advance the gag logically, speech balloons carry dialogue and thought, and expressive line-work conveys motion and panic. Created by artist Swan, the strip was a fixture of newspaper funny pages in the 1920s, when Sunday and daily comic strips established the visual language and recurring-character format that would define the comic book medium.