Stepbrothers

Gene Carr's *Stepbrothers* appears in the Sunday newspaper format that defined early American comics. Two boys navigate sibling rivalry through six panels, their dialogue enclosed in speech balloons and narrative captions. Carr employs the sequential panel structure inherited from nineteenth-century comic illustrators—discrete moments connected by visual and verbal continuity. The strip's humor depends on recognizable character types and domestic scenarios that populated the newspaper comics pages. By 1911, the Sunday funnies had become essential newspaper features, establishing the visual conventions—panel borders, balloon placement, anthropomorphic expression—that would become the grammar of the comic book medium.