Sunday Comic Section

This newspaper Sunday page from the St. Louis Republic represents the birth of American comics—a format that would define the medium for decades. The page combines advertisements with comic strips, establishing the commercial model that sustained sequential art in newspapers. By 1902, artists had already developed the visual vocabulary that comics inherited: panel divisions organizing narrative flow, speech balloons containing dialogue, and recurring characters that built reader loyalty across installments. The Sunday comics section became essential to newspaper circulation, and these pages showcased experiments in color printing and visual storytelling that anticipated the comic book format. These strips demonstrate how newspapers were the true origin point of comics as a narrative art form.