The Rollins Sandspur, March 20, 1920

This student newspaper from Rollins College demonstrates how newspapers of the 1920s organized information across the page. The Sandspur, which began as a literary journal, shows the visual layout principles that would shape early comic strip design: multiple columns, headline hierarchy, and distinct sections competing for reader attention. Though primarily news and editorial content, campus publications like this reveal the graphic conventions—bold typography, spatial compartmentalization, recurring column formats—that newspaper cartoonists simultaneously developed into sequential art. The newspaper page itself was the laboratory where visual storytelling evolved before becoming the comic book.