Terry and Tacks by Joe Farrer

This Sunday page follows Terry and Tacks through a scheme to trim a hat with tacks, leading to predictable slapstick chaos. Farrer employs the visual conventions that had crystallized in newspaper comics by the 1910s: sequential panels arranged in a grid, dialogue balloons, and sight gags building across frames. The characters' exaggerated proportions and expressions drive humor through physical comedy. Newspaper Sunday pages like this one served as the laboratory where cartoonists developed and refined the visual language—panel structure, pacing, and character consistency—that would become foundational to the comic book format emerging in the following decades.