Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This newspaper page presents the "Want" section alongside comic strips and advertisements from the early 1900s. The central comic strip features a simple gag about timing, rendered in black ink with minimal backgrounds—typical of the period's newspaper humor. The visual storytelling relies on sequential panels with speech balloons to convey character interaction and punchline. Early newspaper comics like this, appearing in Sunday editions across America, established the visual grammar that would define the medium: panel borders, word balloons, and recurring characters. These weekly sections were enormously popular, driving newspaper circulation and creating the template that comic books would later adopt. The format demonstrates how daily and Sunday newspaper strips functioned as the true birthplace of American comics, predating and directly influencing the emergence of the comic book industry.