ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Foxy Grandpa

· St. Louis Republic, April 17, 1904

Foxy Grandpa
This Sunday page features two strips: 'Jimmy—They Try Kindness with Him' and 'Foxy Grandpa.' The top strip follows a boy's mischief across multiple panels with consistent characters and sequential narrative. Below, Foxy Grandpa depicts an elderly man outwitting mischievous children through clever schemes, employing physical comedy and visual gags across six panels. Both strips exemplify early newspaper comics: recurring characters, speech balloons, panel-to-panel progression, and slapstick humor. By 1904, Sunday comic pages had become standard newspaper features, establishing the visual vocabulary—bordered panels, expressive linework, sight gags—that would define the medium. These strips demonstrate how newspapers distributed sequential art to mass audiences before comic books existed as a format.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain