The Comic Strip in Early Newspapers

Before comic books existed as bound collections, daily and Sunday newspaper strips were where sequential art developed its visual language. This 1922 *Victoria Daily Times* page shows how newspapers across North America carried strips alongside hard news and advertisements. Comic artists refined the fundamental grammar of the medium—panel borders, speech balloons, recurring characters—within tight deadlines and newspaper space constraints. These strips reached millions of readers and established conventions that would define comics for decades. The newspaper page itself was the mass medium; strips like those here were the training ground where artists experimented with timing, visual gags, and narrative flow that would eventually migrate into the comic books of the 1930s and beyond.