Sunday Comic Section

This 1920 Sunday newspaper page from the New York Herald shows the visual and commercial machinery that birthed American comics. Multiple strips occupy the page—each employing sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters to drive humor across a narrative arc. The layout reflects how newspapers positioned comics as mass entertainment, competing for readers through serialized humor and visual gags. By the 1920s, the formal vocabulary of comics—panel borders, word-image integration, character consistency—was already established convention. These strips appeared daily and weekly across American papers, reaching millions and establishing both the aesthetic grammar and business model that would define the comic book when it emerged as a distinct format in the 1930s.