Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This Sunday newspaper page from the St. Louis Republic demonstrates the commercial vernacular of early 1900s comics—a dense layout mixing department store advertising with illustrated stories and gag panels. The page showcases the visual conventions that emerged in newspaper funny pages: sequential panels with character drawings, speech balloons, and visual humor driving narrative. By 1903, Sunday comics had become a major circulation driver for papers, with artists developing the formal vocabulary—panel borders, expressive line work, recurring characters—that would define the medium. These newspaper pages, distributed nationally and collected in bound volumes, functioned as the direct precursor to modern comic books.