Salesman Sam

A Sunday page from *Salesman Sam*, a comic strip following the schemes and misadventures of an eager traveling salesman. This strip exemplifies the visual conventions that emerged from newspaper comics in the 1920s: rectangular panels arranged in a grid, dialogue contained in speech balloons, and a recurring protagonist navigating episodic situations. The strip's humor relies on physical comedy and rapid scene changes across multiple panels—techniques fundamental to the visual storytelling that would define the emerging comic book form. Newspaper strips like this served as the laboratory where artists developed the panel-based narrative grammar that became the backbone of American comics.