Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This Sunday newspaper page from 1902 demonstrates the format that birthed American comic strips: large illustrated panels with dialogue balloons, sequential narrative, and recurring characters arranged for maximum visual impact on the broadsheet page. By the turn of the century, newspapers competed fiercely for readers through their comic sections, which featured strips that ran daily and in expanded Sunday editions. The visual grammar evident here—panel borders, word balloons, expressive figure drawing—became the foundational language of comic books. Sunday pages like this one were designed as complete entertainments, often in color, driving newspaper circulation while establishing the medium's vocabulary that would define sequential art for generations.