Ethel: Mush Rooming

A Sunday newspaper comic strip featuring Ethel, a young woman with curled hair in a plaid dress, surrounded by mushroom characters in an outdoor setting. The strip employs the visual conventions established by newspaper comics of the 1920s: panel borders, ink linework, and anthropomorphic supporting characters. The titled gag—"Mush Rooming"—plays on mushroom gathering, a common leisure activity. Newspaper Sunday pages like this one were the direct predecessors to comic books, establishing the recurring-character format and sequential art grammar that would define the medium for decades.