Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This newspaper Sunday section represents the medium that birthed American comics. By 1903, the Sunday comics had become a fixture of metropolitan papers, featuring illustrated narratives in sequential panels with speech balloons—the visual grammar that would define the form. Artists working in newspapers developed the vocabulary of page layout, panel progression, and character design that later structured comic books. The Sunday pages competed for readers through humor, adventure, and social commentary, establishing both the economic model and artistic conventions that sustained comics for decades to come.