Mr. Broad of Wall Street — Another Slump in the Market

A five-panel strip following a harried Wall Street financier through his day. Mr. Broad learns his niece is visiting, worries about market losses and his boss's reaction, attempts to impress her with a business partner scheme, and finally greets her at home with forced cheer. The strip uses sequential panel layout with speech balloons to track the protagonist's mounting anxieties. Published in the early 1920s, when newspaper comics were establishing the visual conventions—panel borders, word balloons, recurring characters—that would become the foundation of American comic books. Daily strips like this one reached millions of readers and demonstrated how sequential art could compress narrative and emotion into tight, readable segments.