Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This newspaper section exemplifies the Sunday comics format that emerged in the 1890s, when major papers began featuring illustrated stories in color. By 1903, the Sunday page had become a central feature of urban newspapers, showcasing sequential panel layouts, speech balloons, and repeated characters that would define comic strip language. Artists working in this period—producing strips that ran alongside department store advertisements and serialized narratives—established the visual conventions later adopted by comic books: bordered panels, character continuity, and the integration of text and image. These newspaper sections were the primary venue for comics before the first modern comic book appeared in 1933, making them the true birthplace of the medium's artistic vocabulary.