The Gumps

Sidney Smith's The Gumps follows a middle-class family through domestic comedy and small crises. Here, Andy's cake-baking mishap—three layers of chocolate with nuts—becomes a running gag across multiple panels. Smith's strip exemplifies the narrative sophistication of 1920s newspaper comics: sequential panels advance a coherent story, speech balloons carry naturalistic dialogue, and recurring characters develop through their reactions and choices. Published in newspapers nationwide, The Gumps helped establish the visual grammar that would define comic strips and, later, comic books—the panel grid, the speech balloon, the episodic yet interconnected storytelling that became fundamental to the medium.