Comic Strip Panels: Early 20th Century Newspaper Comics

These three newspaper comic strips—Barnacle Bros, Chicken Scratch, and Hillmer & Holmes!—exemplify the visual vocabulary that emerged from Sunday and daily newspaper comics. Each employs consistent panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters to build gags across sequential images. The strips feature working-class and maritime settings typical of the era, with exaggerated expressions and physical comedy. These strips represent the foundational grammar of comics: the arrangement of panels to control pacing, dialogue balloons to convey character voice, and visual repetition to establish humor. Newspaper comics of this period directly preceded and shaped the comic book format, establishing conventions that remain fundamental to the medium.