From the exhibition
Salesman Sam
· February 8, 1928
A daily strip following Sam, a traveling salesman perpetually chasing commissions and dodging workplace mishaps. These panels show Sam hawking goods through an employment agency while pursuing a sales lead on a new cook. The strip employs the rapid-fire visual gags and sequential narration that defined 1920s newspaper comics: multiple panels per row, overlapping dialogue balloons, exaggerated character expressions, and physical comedy. *Salesman Sam* exemplified how the daily strip format—running six days a week in papers nationwide—created a shared visual language for millions of readers and established recurring characters as a commercial engine driving both newspaper circulation and the emerging comic book industry.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain
