Telling Tommy

A Sunday newspaper strip in which Tommy learns about the history of mirrors from his parents. The strip uses sequential panels and speech balloons to convey casual domestic instruction—a common format for educational humor in 1920s comics. The artist moves from close-up character exchanges to wider scenes of family interaction, establishing continuity through recurring figures and a consistent household setting. Such strips populated the Sunday funny pages, where artists developed the visual vocabulary of panel progression and dialogue that would define comic books: the interplay of image and text, the use of perspective to guide reader attention, and the episodic structure that made newspaper strips the direct predecessors of modern comics.