Stepbrothers

Gene Carr's *Stepbrothers* follows two young boys navigating family life with their stepfather. This Sunday strip demonstrates the visual conventions that emerged from early newspaper comics: sequential panels advancing a narrative, speech balloons carrying dialogue, and recurring characters in domestic settings. Carr employs slapstick humor and exaggerated expressions typical of the period. By the 1910s, newspaper comic strips had become a major medium, establishing the fundamental grammar of panel layout, character consistency, and visual storytelling that would define the emerging comic book form. These Sunday pages, appearing in newspapers nationwide, reached millions of readers and trained the first generation of comic artists and audiences.