Sunday Comic Section — New York Herald

This Sunday newspaper page exemplifies the era when comic strips became the dominant visual entertainment in American dailies and weeklies. By 1920, recurring characters and serialized gags filled dedicated sections, establishing the visual grammar that would define comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, and exaggerated expressions driving narrative forward. The Herald's color Sunday sections reached hundreds of thousands of readers, making newspaper comics the primary mass medium for visual storytelling before the comic book industry emerged in the 1930s. Artists working in this period—developing sight gags, character design, and panel composition—laid the technical and commercial foundation for the medium itself.