Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This Sunday newspaper section showcases the visual language that defined early American comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and illustrated gags arranged across the page. By 1903, the Sunday comics had become a major draw for newspaper circulation, with publishers competing for readers through color printing and humor strips. The format—multiple standalone and serialized stories sharing a single broadsheet—established the template later adopted by comic books. These pages reveal how newspapers pioneered the panel-based storytelling, character development, and visual humor that would become the foundation of the medium.