Our Own Broadway — The San Francisco Call, August 11, 1912

This full Sunday page from The San Francisco Call spreads across three visual registers: a panoramic street illustration of a crowded urban Broadway teeming with pedestrians, trolleys, and storefronts; a medallion inset of a peddler carrying laden baskets; and a bustling restaurant interior where men in suits gesticulate over tables. Bylined to Herbert C. Thompson, the piece is feature illustration rather than sequential strip — text columns anchor the images, describing the polyglot street life of San Francisco's commercial artery. Sunday newspaper pages like this one, produced from the 1890s onward by Pulitzer's and Hearst's competing papers, were the direct incubator of the comic book form: their color presses, recurring characters, panel grids, and speech balloons established the visual language that anthology reprint comics would package into the first true comic books by the late 1930s.