Gabe and By Frueh

Two strips occupy this Sunday newspaper page from *The San Francisco Call*. Gabe (left) features a rotund character in various domestic predicaments—overeating, hiding from creditors, evading his wife—rendered in broad slapstick. By Frueh's strip (right) offers similar comedy of embarrassment and mishap. Both employ the visual vocabulary crystallized by *The Yellow Kid* and early comic strips: sequential panels with speech balloons, exaggerated body language, and recurring characters. The drawing style—thick outlines, minimal backgrounds—reflects the practical demands of newspaper reproduction. These Sunday pages, appearing in papers nationwide, were instrumental in establishing comics as a distinct medium with their own grammar of timing, scale, and gesture.