Terry and Tacks

By Joe Farren, this Sunday strip follows two children through a neighborhood adventure involving marbles, fences, and competitive games. The six-panel grid layout and speech balloons establish the visual conventions that would define comic strips and, eventually, comic books. Terry and Tacks exemplifies the newspaper Sunday page format that dominated early twentieth-century comics—serialized humor built on recurring characters in domestic or street settings. The strip's reliance on sequence, gesture, and dialogue to advance its gags demonstrates how newspaper comic artists developed the narrative grammar of panels that became foundational to the medium. Such strips ran in millions of homes weekly, making them the primary vehicle for comics before the comic book industry emerged.