Sonoma Valley Expositor, July 12, 1901

This regional California newspaper exemplifies the print culture that birthed comic strips. Early comics appeared alongside advertisements and news in weekly and daily papers, where recurring characters and sequential panels first taught readers visual narrative. Artists developed the visual grammar—speech balloons, panel borders, expressive faces—that became the vocabulary of comics. Small-town papers like the Expositor distributed these strips to local audiences, creating the mass readership that would sustain the medium. By 1901, the Sunday newspaper page had become the primary venue for experimenting with sequential art, establishing patterns of layout and character development that directly influenced the comic books to follow.