Jerry on the Job

This Sunday newspaper page displays six comic strips representing the early twentieth-century birth of sequential art. Jerry on the Job follows a young protagonist through workplace mishaps using the visual grammar newly standardized by newspaper cartoonists: bordered panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters. The strips here employ slapstick humor and sight gags—a boy climbing trees, characters tumbling and running—rendered in bold ink lines. Published in the Sunday comics alongside Krazy Kat, Abie the Agent, and Polly and Her Pals, these strips reached millions of readers daily. Newspaper comics pioneered the panel-based narrative structure and character development that would define comic books.