Jerry on the Job

This Sunday newspaper page displays five comic strips, including Jerry on the Job, which follows a young working-class protagonist through misadventures at his employer's railyard. The strip uses sequential panels with speech balloons to advance its narrative—visual conventions that define early newspaper comics. Jerry on the Job and its companion strips (Krazy Kat, Abie the Agent, Polly and Her Pals, US Boys) exemplify the Sunday funnies that launched the comic medium. These newspaper pages, appearing daily and weekly from the 1890s onward, established the grammar of panels, character recurrence, and sight gags that became foundational to comic books.