The Gumps

A domestic comedy strip following a middle-class family through everyday situations. Here, a child's birthday celebration unfolds across two complete stories: the mother's attempts to manage the day while hungry and tired, and a separate gag featuring "Old Doc Yak." The strip uses sequential panels with speech balloons, close-ups, and recurring characters—formal innovations that became standard in newspaper comics. The Gumps ran as both daily strips and full-page Sunday features, establishing the visual vocabulary that would define comic strips and later comic books themselves.