Illustrating Webster: 'Efflation'

Frank L. Stanton Jr.'s comic strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary that newspapers had pioneered by the 1910s: multiple panels, speech balloons, exaggerated caricature, and sequential narrative. Here, a boastful traveling salesman regales two listeners with tales of romantic conquests and expense-account excess across American cities. The listener's response—"Smeared with class!"—punctuates the gag. The strip illustrates Webster's dictionary definition of *efflation*: "the act of filling with wind." Newspaper comics of this era served as the direct ancestors of the comic book form, establishing how readers would follow action across panels and interpret visual humor through type and drawing.