Gabe by Frueh

A Sunday comic strip from the San Francisco Call featuring Gabe, a recurring child character created by artist Frueh. The strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary emerging in early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, sight gags driven by physical comedy, and a linear narrative arc spanning multiple rows. Here, Gabe's antics escalate from indoor mischief to outdoor chaos involving a fence and a train. The strip exemplifies how Sunday newspaper comics sections became laboratories for visual storytelling, establishing conventions—panel borders, dialogue placement, expressive cartooning—that would define the medium for decades. These Sunday pages and their daily counterparts were the direct precursors to the comic book format.