From the exhibition
Salesman Sam
· January 31, 1928
A Sunday strip following Sam, a traveling salesman, through comedic misadventures. Here Sam attends a theater showing a Romeo and Kitty production—a parody of Romeo and Juliet—where packed houses and sold-out crowds create chaos. The six-panel layout uses bold black ink, geometric perspective, and expressive figures to build sight gags: crowded lobbies, balcony scenes, and the manager's exasperation. Speech balloons carry rapid-fire dialogue and sound effects. *Salesman Sam* typifies 1920s newspaper comics, which established the visual vocabulary of sequential art: recurring characters, panel borders, and word-image integration that became foundational to comic books.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain
