Etta Kett

Paul Robinson's *Etta Kett* follows a flapper heroine through romantic misadventures and comedic scrapes. Here, Etta deals with a bird trapped in the windshield and an intruder who drops his gun—gags built on physical sight lines and rapid dialogue exchanges typical of newspaper comics. Robinson employs the visual grammar developed by pioneering cartoonists: sequential panels, speech balloons, expressive linework, and recurring characters. The strip's energy derives from panel-to-panel pacing and overlapping conversations, techniques that would become foundational to comic books. Newspaper strips like this one trained readers in visual narrative and established the formal language that comics would inherit and expand.