Terry and Tacks

Joe Farren's *Terry and Tacks* follows a young boy and his small companion through domestic misadventures. This Sunday page demonstrates the visual conventions crystallizing in newspaper comics: sequential panels advancing a narrative gag, speech balloons carrying dialogue, and recurring child characters whose antics anchor family humor. The strip's layout—six panels arranged in three tiers—reflects the standardized grid system newspapers adopted for the Sunday funnies, allowing comic strips to share page real estate efficiently. By 1918, such formal devices had become the visual language of comics, established through decades of newspaper experimentation and now being adapted into the early comic books emerging from reprinted newspaper material.