Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This newspaper page represents the early Sunday comics era, when sequential illustrated stories began appearing in color in American dailies and weeklies. By 1901, the visual language of comics—panel progression, speech balloons, and recurring characters—was still developing. The page mixes political caricature, human-interest stories, and visual humor alongside news content, reflecting how comics emerged from editorial cartooning and theatrical illustration. These newspaper supplements, distributed to thousands weekly, created the mass audience and visual vocabulary that would evolve into the comic book industry by the 1930s.