Stepbrothers

Gene Carr's *Stepbrothers* follows Gus's pursuit of a dumbbell through eight panels of physical comedy and domestic chaos. The strip exemplifies early Sunday newspaper comics: recurring child characters, slapstick gags, and speech balloons advancing a simple narrative across a grid. Carr uses varied panel sizes and cross-hatching to convey action and emotion. By 1910, such strips had become standard fare in Sunday supplements, establishing visual conventions—sequential panels, expressive caricature, and sight gags—that would define the medium. These newspaper pages, not books, were where the language of comics took root, reaching millions of readers weekly and influencing the emerging comic book industry.