From the exhibition
Fearless O'Flynn and the Spook
· The San Francisco Call, August 6, 1911

This Sunday newspaper page features serialized adventure strips typical of early 1900s dailies and weeklies. The main strip, rendered in pen-and-ink crosshatching, depicts an action sequence with multiple panels following a protagonist through dramatic scenes. Below sits 'Finding the Statue,' a serial narrative illustrated across three connected scenes. These strips exemplify how newspapers became primary venues for sequential visual storytelling before comic books emerged as a distinct medium. The panel-based layout, speech balloons, recurring characters, and visual continuity techniques established here became foundational to twentieth-century comics vocabulary, as artists developed the visual grammar that would define the form.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain