Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This Sunday newspaper page from the St. Louis Republic demonstrates the emerging commercial power of comic strips in early 1900s dailies and weeklies. The section mixes serialized comic narratives with department store advertising—a business model that would define newspaper comics for decades. Sequential panel layouts, speech balloons, and recurring characters anchor stories that ran across multiple issues, building reader loyalty and circulation. The integration of color printing, which required Sunday editions to justify the expense, elevated comics from filler to front-page draw. By 1903, strips had become essential to newspaper strategy, driving the visual and narrative conventions that would eventually codify the modern comic book format.