Salesman Sam

Salesman Sam, a daily comic strip by Small, follows the misadventures of its protagonist through rapid-fire gags and physical comedy. Here Sam juggles a phone call with a police officer while managing a scheming customer—typical of the strip's reliance on slapstick and dialogue-driven humor. The panel structure shows the evolution of newspaper comics: sequential frames with speech balloons advance the narrative across a single strip, a format that became foundational to comic books. Small's energetic line work and character acting demonstrate the visual vocabulary—exaggerated expressions, dynamic poses, background detail—that cartoonists developed for the newspaper page and later adapted to the new medium of comic books.