From the exhibition
Penelope's Postals — Just an Ambiguity
· October 1, 1922

This daily strip captures a young woman navigating office work through wordplay and physical comedy. The four-panel sequence uses speech balloons and sequential staging to build a visual gag: Penelope's boss demands she improve her stenography skills, unaware she's been practicing with a dumbbell—a misheard homophone that drives the humor. The strip exemplifies how newspaper comics of the early 1920s employed recurring characters, panel layouts, and overlapping dialogue to deliver jokes within tight editorial constraints. The casual line work and expressive figure drawing reflect the economical style demanded by daily publication schedules that would influence the emerging comic book form.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain