Sunday Comic Section — St. Louis Republic

This newspaper Sunday section demonstrates the visual conventions that shaped early comic narrative. Multiple strips share the page in a layout typical of 1900s dailies and Sunday editions—the laboratory where sequential art developed. Artists working in this period established the fundamental grammar: rectangular panels arranged in reading order, speech balloons containing dialogue, recurring characters returning week after week. The newspaper comic strip, appearing six days a week and multiple times on Sundays, reached millions of readers and created the first mass audience for sequential visual storytelling. These pages were the direct precursor to the comic book format that would emerge in the 1930s.