"Yer Out!" by Clare Briggs

Clare Briggs's Sunday strip uses sequential panels and speech balloons to follow a baseball umpire ejecting players and fans from a game. The horizontal layout and modular grid structure—developed by newspaper cartoonists in the early 1900s—became foundational to comic strip design. Briggs's work exemplifies how daily and Sunday comics pioneered visual narrative techniques: multiple viewpoints, overlapping action, recurring characters, and dialogue integrated into image. These formal innovations, refined across thousands of newspaper strips, established the visual grammar that later defined the comic book medium.