Sunday Comic Section

This newspaper Sunday page from the St. Louis Republic shows the comic strip as it existed in the earliest years of the medium—integrated into a dense retail advertisement layout typical of turn-of-the-century papers. While the specific strip titles are difficult to isolate in this crowded page design, the section demonstrates how comics emerged not as a separate feature but embedded within commercial pages. By 1902, newspapers had begun using sequential panel art with speech balloons and recurring characters to attract readers. These strips—whether humorous domestic scenes or slapstick adventures—established visual conventions that would define the medium: consistent character designs, narrative progression across panels, and dialogue integrated into the image itself. This format proved so popular it soon became the foundation of the comic book industry.