The Yellow Kid" (initially published under the name "Hogan's Alley") by Richard Felton Outcault is most frequently cited as the starting point of the modern comic strip. (Others see "The Yellow Kid" as merely an insignificant precursor compared to the German "Struwwelpeter" and the British satirical newspaper "Ally Sloper's Half Holiday"). Outcault was hired by Joseph Pulitzer in 1895 at a time when he was in a newspaper war for the favour of New Yorkers, in which caricatures and joke pages played a major role. In February 1896, Pulitzer succeeded in putting a bright, printable yellow on paper that overshadowed the dull colours of the previous editions - from 1893, coloured Sunday supplements appeared in the New York newspapers. This colour was used for the first time for the popular figure of the "Yellow Kid". The character of the clumsy little vagabond depicted in "The Yellow Kid" remained the central theme of the comic until the 1920s.

After Outcault and his series were poached by Pulitzer's competitor William Randolph Hearst, Outcault came up with something new and adopted the principle of the picture story. He also integrated speech bubbles for the first time. Previously, the writing had only been placed in text boxes or on the Yellow Kid's nightgown. The idea of the dialogue speech bubble was not new; it first appeared in German in 1862 in the satirical magazine "Kladderadatsch". It was first popularised in English caricature around 1800.

Another series that is part of the transition from individual images and caricatures to the combination of several individual images is the series "The Katzenjammer Kids" by the German illustrator Rudolph Dirks, first published in 1897. The template for this was provided by Wilhelm Busch with "Max and Moritz". It was not only the characters and the arrangement as a picture story alone that were influential, but also the elements of schadenfreude and the conflict between moral ideas and individual instincts. In 1859, Wilhelm Busch's first picture stories were printed as the Munich Picture Book. The prerequisite for this was lithography, introduced in 1798, which provided the first inexpensive method of reproducing images. In the German-speaking world, Rodolphe Töpffer in particular became well known for his publication of 6 picture stories between 1833 and 1845.

The term comic, also known as "new humour" or "funnies" in the early years, refers to the predominantly comic content of the new medium and the associated rejection from the culturally conservative side. Formats such as "The Kinder Kids" (1906) by Lyonel Feininger, published in the "Chicago Tribune", and "Little Nemo" (1905) by Winsor McCay attempted to escape these attributions through their artistic aspirations, the blending of different art styles such as Art Nouveau and Cubism. In contrast to other comics, "Little Nemo" also tells an evolving story. The pleasure of seeing prevails over the cartoon-inspired simplification of the drawing. With the introduction of the principle of continuation and the creation of epic storylines, Little Nemo is the model for many subsequent comics.

From 1907, in addition to the colour Sunday supplements, one-line weekday strips in black and white were created, which made the burlesque character of the comic strip even more prominent. A standardisation of form, framing and a fairly fixed number of panels became part of the comic's grammar and were intended to increase the recognisability and marketability of the comics.

The series "The Dingbat Family" by George Herriman appeared from 1910 as a daily strip in the New Yorker Journal from Mondays to Saturdays. Within this strip, the constellation of characters around "Krazy Kat" is created as a strip within a strip. From 1913, "Krazy Kat" appeared as an independent daily strip. Among other things, "Krazy Kat" is known for its use of surrealistic visual elements.

From 1925, the speech bubble also became established in Europe ("Zig et Puce" by Alain Saint-Ogan, "Les Aventures de Tintin" by Hergé (1929), after the speech bubbles were removed in the first reprints of American comics in order to bring the comics closer to classic European picture stories. With Tintin, Hergé characterised his own drawing style, which would later be called "ligne claire". It is characterised by precise, functional contours. At the narrative level, every element drives the story forward; nothing superfluous is told.