Ethel, 'The Puppy Love'

This single-panel cartoon by Ethel exemplifies the humor of 1920s newspaper comics. A man kneels before a young woman, offering her a flower, while she coyly responds to his flattery about her appearance. The artist employs the visual conventions that had become standard in the Sunday funnies: exaggerated body language, a speech balloon capturing dialogue, and simple crosshatching for depth. Newspaper comics of this era—both strips and single panels—served as the proving ground for the sequential art language that would define the medium. Artists working in these pages developed the grammar of panels, captions, and character expression that later cartoonists would expand into the comic book form.