Sunday Comic Section — The Sun (New York)

This Sunday newspaper comic section exemplifies the visual innovations that shaped the medium. Multiple strips share the page in the standardized grid format that became foundational to comic books: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and sight gags that drive narrative forward through image and text. By 1917, the Sunday funny papers were America's primary venue for comics—serialized entertainment distributed to millions. Artists developed the visual grammar here—panel borders, word placement, and exaggerated expressions—techniques that would define the industry when comic books emerged as a distinct format in the 1930s. These newspaper pages represent the actual birth of sequential art as mass medium.