Victoria Daily Times, January 7, 1924

This front page from a British Columbia newspaper shows the newspaper format that gave birth to the modern comic strip. Though the page contains primarily news stories and advertisements, the layout—with its use of panels, headlines of varying sizes, and visual hierarchy—established design principles that sequential art would adopt. By the 1920s, newspaper comics had become the dominant medium for visual storytelling in North America, featuring recurring characters in daily and Sunday installments. These strips invented the visual grammar still used in comics today: word balloons, panel-to-panel progression, and character-driven narrative. Newspapers were where cartoonists like George Herriman, Milton Caniff, and Chester Gould reached millions of readers daily, making comics an accessible mass medium before any comic book industry existed.