Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This newspaper comic strip demonstrates the visual innovations emerging in early Sunday pages: sequential panels arranged to guide reader flow, speech balloons containing dialogue, and exaggerated character expressions rendered in bold line work. The strip employs slapstick humor typical of turn-of-the-century comedy—physical mishaps and absurd situations drive the narrative across multiple frames. These Sunday newspaper comics, appearing regularly in metropolitan dailies, established the formal grammar that would define comic books: panel borders directing eye movement, visual pacing through composition, and recurring characters that built reader loyalty. By 1901, such illustrated humor sections had become standard newspaper features, directly prefiguring the comic book format that would crystallize in the 1930s.