Newspaper Front Page, Victoria Daily Times

This Victoria Daily Times front page demonstrates the newspaper layout conventions of the early 1900s. Articles fill multiple columns with modest illustrations—a scene of fishing on the Cranbrook River, a horse-drawn cart—placed strategically to break up dense text. No comic strips appear on this page, yet newspapers of this era were laboratories for visual storytelling. Within a decade, serialized comic strips with recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons would emerge in Sunday supplements, directly spawning the comic book format. The architectural grammar of comics—panel borders, word balloons, character continuity—grew from these newspaper pages where artists experimented with ways to blend image and narrative for mass audiences.