Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This newspaper page from the St. Louis Republic represents the crucial moment when comics emerged as a distinct medium within American journalism. By 1902, Sunday papers featured illustrated stories with sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters—visual conventions still used today. The section mixes advertising with comic narratives, reflecting how newspapers monetized entertainment while developing the visual grammar of sequential art. Artists working in this era established panel layouts, facial expressions, and body language to convey action and emotion across multiple images. These Sunday supplements reached millions of readers and directly preceded the first comic books of the 1930s, making newspaper pages like this the true birthplace of the medium.