Salesman Sam

This Sunday page follows Sam through three episodic gags typical of newspaper comics' golden age. The strip uses sequential panels with speech balloons to chart Sam's misadventures: a morning fizz drink, a confused encounter at an ice box, and a arithmetic puzzle about a coach's wheels. Artist Small employs slapstick timing and visual repetition across panels—a direct inheritance from silent film and vaudeville. *Salesman Sam* exemplifies how newspaper comics of the 1920s–30s pioneered the visual grammar later adopted by comic books: bordered frames, word-picture integration, and recurring characters in domestic or workplace settings that audiences followed daily or weekly.