Victoria Daily Times, July 14, 1917

This front page from a British Columbia newspaper illustrates the newspaper comic strip's role as mass entertainment during World War I. The dense layout—mixing war dispatches, political coverage, and advertisements with comics—shows how illustrated stories shared space with urgent news. Comic strips in daily papers pioneered the visual language later adopted by comic books: sequential panels, speech balloons, and character continuity that kept readers returning. These strips reached millions through affordable newspapers, making them the primary medium for sequential art before the comic book industry emerged in the 1930s. Artists working in this format developed the panel transitions and visual storytelling conventions that became the foundation of modern comics.