The Gumps

Sidney Smith's The Gumps follows a middle-class family through domestic comedy and mild misadventure. This Sunday page shows the characteristic format of newspaper comics: multiple tiers of panels with speech balloons, recurring characters in daily situations, and visual gags that drive the plot. Smith's clean line work and sequential storytelling became a template for comic strips. Appearing in newspapers nationwide six days a week plus Sunday, The Gumps and strips like it created the visual and narrative grammar later adopted by comic books—panel borders, word balloons, character consistency, and the blend of humor with ongoing storylines that defined the medium from the 1920s onward.