Etta Kett

*Etta Kett*, drawn by Paul Robinson, follows a flapper-era teenager navigating domestic life and social independence. This strip exemplifies the daily newspaper comic's visual vocabulary: sequential panels, speech balloons advancing plot and character voice, and recurring figures in episodic situations. The four-panel format became standard for dailies that syndicated to hundreds of papers nationwide. Robinson's clean line work and gestural poses capture period fashion and social comedy. Etta Kett ran from 1925 to 1974, part of the economic infrastructure—syndication, daily deadlines, character licensing—that transformed comics from novelty into mass medium and eventually seeded the comic book industry of the 1930s.