Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This densely packed Sunday newspaper page exemplifies the birth of sequential comics in American journalism. Multiple comic strips populate the page in varied sizes and panel layouts, establishing visual conventions that would define the medium: bordered panels, speech balloons, recurring characters, and sight gags told across sequential frames. The strips employ broad humor accessible to working-class readers—slapstick, domestic comedy, social satire. The design reflects newspapers' crucial role in developing comics' visual grammar between 1890–1910, when Sunday color sections became cultural phenomena. Artists experimented freely with panel arrangement and character type here, creating the formal and comedic vocabulary later comics inherited. These pages were comics' first home, preceding dedicated comic books by decades.