Etta Kett by Paul Robinson

Paul Robinson's *Etta Kett* followed the daily adventures of a young working-class woman navigating urban life, romance, and practical difficulties. This strip exemplifies the newspaper comic's visual language: multiple panels advancing a linear narrative, speech balloons carrying dialogue and thought, and recurring characters in serialized situations. By the late 1920s, strips like this appeared in hundreds of papers daily, reaching millions of readers. The form—originating in the 1890s with Outcault's *Yellow Kid*—established panel sequence, word-image integration, and character continuity as the foundational grammar of comics. Newspaper strips were the direct ancestor of the comic book industry that emerged in the 1930s.