Terry and Tacks

By Joe Farren, this Sunday strip follows Terry and his friend Tacks through a schoolyard hockey game where a substitute player accidentally bucks the bully's line, triggering a chaotic chain reaction. The strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary newspapers had developed by the 1910s: sequential panels arranged in grid formation, speech balloons advancing plot and character voice, and recurring child protagonists navigating everyday mishaps. The newspaper comic strip served as the direct precursor to the comic book format, establishing the panel-based sequential art language that would define the medium for decades.