Sunday Comic Section, The San Francisco Call

This newspaper comic section from 1913 showcases the visual forms that would define twentieth-century comics: multi-panel narrative sequences, speech balloons, and recurring characters. The layout demonstrates how Sunday papers organized strips across full pages, mixing humor with advertising. By this era, sequential art had moved beyond single gags to tell stories across panels, establishing the grammar later adopted by comic books. These newspaper pages were the laboratory where artists invented the visual vocabulary of comics: panel borders guiding eye movement, word and image in deliberate relationship, character development across installments.