The Gimlet Club

A five-panel newspaper comic strip depicting two characters in conversation on a street. The older man instructs the young boy about the economics of smoking—calculating the cost of daily cigarettes over a year and demonstrating how small daily expenses compound into substantial sums. The strip employs sequential panels with speech balloons, a visual format pioneered by newspaper comics in the 1890s and early 1900s. The recurring characters and serialized narrative structure were hallmarks of the Sunday and daily comic pages that established the visual language later adopted by comic books. The strip's didactic humor reflects the moralistic tone common in early twentieth-century newspaper comics, which often paired entertainment with practical instruction.