Sunday Comic Section

This Sunday newspaper page from the St. Louis Republic demonstrates the format that launched American comics: multiple strips sharing a broadsheet, combining text stories, illustrated features, and sequential art. By 1902, the Sunday funnies had become a major circulation driver for papers competing in growing urban markets. Artists developed the visual vocabulary—panel borders, speech balloons, recurring characters—that would define comic books decades later. The page mixes humor strips with topical illustrations and editorial cartoons, reflecting how newspapers used sequential and illustrated narrative to entertain and inform readers before dedicated comic books existed.