Telling Tommy

A domestic comic strip featuring a young boy and his grandmother. The Sunday page demonstrates the visual conventions established by newspaper comics in the 1920s: multiple panels with speech balloons, sequential narrative flow, and recurring characters in domestic settings. The grandmother delivers an extended monologue about moth reproduction and pollination—a characteristic device of the era, where humor derived from adult characters explaining natural phenomena to children. The strip's layout exemplifies how Sunday pages incorporated large illustrations alongside smaller panels, balancing visual interest with storytelling. Such strips appeared in newspapers nationwide, establishing the visual grammar and character archetypes that would define the emerging comic book medium.