Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This Sunday newspaper comic section demonstrates the visual storytelling conventions that emerged in early-twentieth-century newspaper comics. The page features illustrated scenes with characters in sequential arrangement, speech balloons, and narrative captions—the formal devices that define comic strips. By 1903, Sunday comics had become standard features in major newspapers, offering serialized humor and sports satire to mass audiences. Artists working in this period developed the visual grammar that would shape comic books: the panel layout, word-image integration, and recurring character types. The newspaper Sunday page functioned as the primary venue for comics before the comic book format consolidated these strips into bound collections in the 1930s.