The Enterprise, South San Francisco (September 7, 1907)

This front page of a South San Francisco newspaper shows the dense typographic layout typical of early 1900s periodicals, where news, advertisements, and brief notices competed for space without illustration. The absence of comic strips here reflects the transitional moment before comics became standard newspaper features. Sunday and daily comic strips—pioneered by artists like Richard Outcault and Winsor McCay—were establishing the visual vocabulary of sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters that would define the medium. By the 1920s, comics would dominate newspaper pages; this 1907 edition documents the pre-dominance of text-heavy journalism before that shift transformed popular culture.