Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This Sunday newspaper section from the St. Louis Republic showcases the visual vocabulary that defined early comics: multiple panels arranged in sequence, speech balloons conveying dialogue, and recurring characters navigating ongoing narratives. By 1903, the Sunday funnies had become a commercial engine driving newspaper circulation, with artists developing the sequential storytelling techniques that would structure comics for decades. The dense layout and integrated text-image relationship visible here—characteristic of newspapers competing for readers—demonstrates how the Sunday pages served as the primary venue for visual narrative before comic books emerged as a distinct medium. These newspaper strips established the grammar of panels, captions, and character continuity that comics inherited.