A Trip to Mars

This Sunday comic strip exemplifies the visual conventions of early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring character types, and sight gags built around a fantastic premise. Two Earth visitors tour a Martian millinery, encountering Martian women and their fashion practices. The strip's humor depends on the contrast between familiar earthly concerns—Easter bonnets and sales—and an alien setting. By 1911, newspaper comics had established the basic grammar of the medium: panel borders to delineate action, dialogue in balloons, and the serial narrative spread across a page. Such strips filled the Sunday supplements that made comics a mass medium before they appeared in bound collections.