Stepbrothers—Yes, Yes, but Who Wins the Cigar?

This Sunday comic strip from the San Francisco Call follows two young stepbrothers competing over a cigar through twelve panels of escalating physical comedy. The narrative unfolds across three rows, using sequential panel layouts to track the boys' struggle—they wrestle, tumble, and chase each other across outdoor terrain. Speech balloons carry their dialogue and reactions, while visual gags depend on clear staging and repetition of poses across adjacent panels. By 1913, newspaper comic strips had established the visual grammar that would define the medium: recurring characters, panel-to-panel continuity, and humor driven by both words and image. Sunday sections like this one, appearing in major papers nationwide, became the primary venue for comics before comic books emerged in the 1930s, making newspaper cartoonists the true architects of sequential art.