Krazy Kat — The Washington Times, January 26, 1919

This Sunday broadsheet page from The Washington Times shows the full ecosystem of the American comic strip at the moment it was inventing itself. George Herriman's Krazy Kat occupies the upper-left corner — the strip's dreamy, triangulated love affair (Kat, Ignatz Mouse, Officer Pupp) rendered in Herriman's loose, nervously alive line. Sharing the page are Abie the Agent, Jerry on the Job, Polly and Her Pals, and The Dingbat Family — each a study in the visual grammar being codified in real time: guttered panels, speech balloons carrying distinct voices, recurring characters driving serialized comedy. Several strips deploy the broad ethnic caricature standard to the era — exaggerated features, dialect spelling — reflecting how immigrant urban life was simultaneously celebrated and mocked in popular print. These syndicated Sunday pages, cut and stapled by readers, are the direct physical ancestor of the comic book.