Make-A-Comic: The Newest Craze

This newspaper Sunday strip exemplifies the participatory humor of 1920s comics. Readers were invited to complete the blank panels themselves—a format that merged entertainment with audience engagement. The strip features a Gothic cathedral setting and characters in period dress, with sequential panels and speech balloons that guide the viewer's eye across the page. By the mid-1920s, newspaper comics had established the visual language—panel borders, captions, word balloons—that would define the medium for decades. Artists working in the Sunday pages pioneered techniques for pacing, character design, and narrative flow that became foundational to commercial comic books when they emerged in the 1930s.