A Few Laughs With the Comic Artists

This Sunday newspaper page collects humorous sketches by multiple artists, a format that helped establish comics as a popular feature in American papers. The sketches employ the emerging visual conventions of the era: simple line work, exaggerated facial features, and sequential panels that build a joke through action rather than words alone. Each artist contributes character studies and sight gags—a toymaker's mishap, a castaway's predicament, children at play—demonstrating how newspapers used comic illustrations to drive circulation. These pages, appearing weekly in major dailies and Sunday editions, trained both artists and readers in the visual grammar that would define comic strips: panel borders, varying scales, and the relationship between drawing and caption. By the early 1900s, newspaper comics had become essential entertainment, directly shaping the conventions that later defined comic books.