The Sun (New York), July 15, 1917 — Sports Page

What is shown here is not a comic strip at all. This is the sports section of The Sun (New York), July 15, 1917 — a dense broadsheet page reporting baseball scores, game summaries, and wire dispatches, with three action photographs from a Giants doubleheader at the Polo Grounds. Headlines announce a 36,000-person crowd, Yankee losses, and a Dodgers sweep. The page represents the newspaper ecosystem that did incubate the Sunday comics: the same broadsheet format, the same printing infrastructure, the same mass readership that made Winsor McCay's Little Nemo and its peers possible — but no strip, no panels, no speech balloons appear here.