From the exhibition
The Sun Sunday Comic Section
· June 10, 1917

This Sunday newspaper section from The Sun features Lord Northcliffe, head of the British War Commission in the United States, as its lead story with portrait photograph and accompanying text. The page layout—mixing news articles, photographs, and illustrated content across multiple columns—reflects the early twentieth-century newspaper format where comic strips emerged alongside reportage. Sunday comic sections like this served as laboratories for sequential visual narrative, establishing the panel-based layouts, speech balloons, and character continuity that would define comic books. Artists working in newspapers during this period developed the visual grammar—gutters between panels, varied panel sizes, integrated word and image—that became the foundation of the medium.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain