Etta Kett by Paul Robinson

Paul Robinson's *Etta Kett* followed the daily adventures of a young flapper navigating school, romance, and social life. The strip employs the visual vocabulary that newspaper comics had crystallized by the 1920s: rectangular panels arranged left-to-right, speech balloons anchored to speakers, and recurring characters whose expressions and body language drive the humor. *Etta Kett* appeared in Sunday pages and daily strips, reaching millions of readers. Like other comic strips of the era, it demonstrated how sequential art—multiple images in sequence—could tell a complete story with economy and timing. These newspaper strips were the direct ancestors of the comic book format that emerged in the 1930s.