All the Funny Folks

This cover collects newspaper comic strip characters, the medium that birthed modern comics. Two well-dressed gentlemen ride a bucking mule labeled "Spark Plug," while cartoon faces crowd the border—a visual inventory of the recurring characters readers followed daily in papers nationwide. By the 1920s, strips had established the visual vocabulary still used today: speech balloons, exaggerated expressions, physical comedy drawn across multiple frames. Artists like these pioneers developed the sequential art form that made comics a mass medium. These strips, syndicated coast-to-coast, demonstrated that comics could sustain loyal audiences through character and narrative, laying the foundation for the comic book industry to follow.