From the exhibition
Ella Cinders
· June 24, 1925

A six-panel Sunday strip following Ella as she brings home leftovers from her work in a restaurant kitchen. When a friend stops by, Ella invites her in for lunch, leading to an awkward moment when the friend discovers the modest meal consists of restaurant scraps reheated at home. The strip's sequential narrative—moving from setup through reaction to punchline—exemplifies the visual storytelling that emerged in newspaper comics of the 1920s. Speech balloons, panel progression, and recurring characters like Ella became the foundational vocabulary that comics inherited from newspaper strips to define the medium.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain