Salesman Sam

This Sunday strip follows Sam through a comic misadventure involving a horse, a telephone switchboard, and a harried office manager. The strip demonstrates the visual storytelling conventions that shaped comic strips: sequential panels advance the plot, speech balloons convey dialogue and reaction, and character expressions drive the humor. Salesman Sam ran in newspapers from 1921 through the 1930s, belonging to the tradition of dailies and Sunday pages that established the grammar of comics—recurring protagonists, sight gags, slapstick action, and the interplay of word and image. Such strips, appearing in mass-circulation newspapers, became the primary form of comics before the industry shifted to standalone books in the late 1930s.