Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This Sunday newspaper page represents the pivotal moment when comics emerged from single panels into sequential storytelling. The section features multiple strips sharing the page, a format that became standard in American newspapers. Early comic artists of this period—working in ink and halftone—established visual conventions still used today: panel borders guiding narrative flow, speech balloons containing dialogue, and recurring characters that built reader loyalty across weeks. The strips reflect turn-of-the-century humor and popular culture, including ethnic caricature common to the era's entertainment. These Sunday supplements, reaching hundreds of thousands of readers, directly preceded the first comic books of the 1930s, making newspapers the true birthplace of the medium.