How Do They Do It?

This comic strip uses the six-panel grid format standard to newspaper Sunday pages, following a single character through a series of economic schemes. Each panel advances the gag sequentially: the protagonist attempts to avoid paying for meals, avoid paying rent, economize with broken kitchens, obtain easy money, change a bill, and finally ends up knocked down—the visual punchline to his get-rich-quick efforts. The strip employs speech balloons, expressive line work, and physical comedy common to the era's newspaper comics, which established the visual language later adopted by comic books. Such daily strips were the primary venue for sequential narrative art and character development in early twentieth-century American print media.