Superstitious Sam's Pal Killed a Spider!

This newspaper comic strip illustrates the visual conventions emerging in early-1900s sequential art: numbered panels, speech balloons advancing narrative, and recurring characters playing variations on a single gag. Sam's friend kills a spider—supposedly bringing bad luck—and the strip follows the escalating chaos and misunderstandings that follow. The artist uses expressive caricature and sight gags (the officer, the jail cell finale) typical of newspaper humor pages that preceded modern comic books. By 1905, such strips appeared daily and Sunday in papers nationwide, establishing the panel-based grammar—gutters, balloon placement, character consistency—that would define comics as a medium.