Gabe by Frueh

This Sunday comic strip follows Gabe through his misadventures as he attempts to smuggle pastries past customs officials. Frueh's panel layout—six rows of three sequential images—demonstrates the formal conventions newspapers had established for Sunday comics: regular grids, speech balloons, and recurring character types. The strip exemplifies how newspaper comic sections functioned as laboratories for visual storytelling during the medium's formative years, establishing the grammatical structures—panel borders, word-image integration, comedic timing through sequence—that would define the emerging comic book form.