I Always Say

This single-panel gag strip, attributed to O. Soglow, exemplifies the humor format common to newspaper Sunday supplements. A heavyset man gestures expansively while recounting a fishing tale to a smaller companion—a setup that relies on physical comedy and exaggeration for its effect. The artist uses bold ink lines and stark contrasts characteristic of newspaper reproduction, with speech balloons containing the punchline. Such strips populated the comics pages alongside serialized adventure strips, establishing conventions that would define the medium: recurring characters, visual gags scaled for quick reading, and the marriage of text and image. These newspaper venues—not comic books—incubated the visual language that became comics.