Terry and Tacks

Joe Farren's *Terry and Tacks* exemplifies the visual storytelling conventions that emerged in newspaper comic strips during the 1910s. The strip employs a grid of panels, speech balloons, and recurring child characters to unfold a narrative sequence—here, Terry making mischief with Timmy and a street lamp. The dense page layout, combining multiple gag strips and sequential scenes, was typical of Sunday newspaper supplements. Such strips established the visual grammar later adopted by comic books: panel borders to segment action, dialogue contained in balloons, and character-driven humor spanning multiple frames. These newspaper pages served as laboratories where artists and writers developed the medium's formal language.