Telling Tommy

This comic strip demonstrates the visual storytelling conventions that shaped early newspaper comics. The three-panel layout uses speech balloons and sequential imagery to build a joke about glassblowing—a father explains the craft to his son, who then reports back with characteristic childhood literalism. The pen-and-ink drawing style and reliance on dialogue-driven humor were standard for daily newspaper strips of the 1920s. Such strips, appearing six days a week in papers nationwide, established the visual grammar—panel borders, word balloons, recurring characters—that would become foundational to comic books themselves.