Sunday Newspaper Comic Section

This Sunday edition of the St. Louis Republic demonstrates the newspaper comic section at the turn of the twentieth century—the primary venue where sequential art developed into a distinct medium. The page combines illustration, text blocks, and photographic imagery typical of Sunday supplements that reached mass audiences. By 1903, newspapers had established the visual conventions that would define comics: recurring characters, panel sequences, and hand-lettered dialogue. These Sunday pages and accompanying daily strips were the laboratory where artists refined the grammar of sequential storytelling—layout strategies, perspective, and visual gags—decades before the first comic books appeared. Newspaper comics created the audience, vocabulary, and economic model upon which the comic book industry would build.