And Sam Jes' Couldn't Help Laughing!

This Sunday comic from the *Chicago Sunday Examiner* demonstrates the visual conventions that defined early newspaper comics. The strip employs sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and escalating physical comedy—the formal vocabulary developed by pioneers of the medium in the 1890s. The narrative follows a simple premise: Sam's infectious laughter spreads through a household and spills into the street, triggering increasingly chaotic scenes of contagious hilarity. The artist uses size variation, crowd density, and overlapping figures to convey mounting pandemonium across a twelve-panel grid. Such strips appeared in Sunday papers nationwide, establishing the language of comics that would carry into the comic books of the 1930s onward.