Kid-ology by Ned Woodman

This single-panel comic features a young boy at a washbasin, his hands visibly soiled from play. The accompanying text—a brief moral lesson—explains why hand-washing matters: dirt harbors germs that cause illness, and soap costs little. The strip exemplifies early twentieth-century newspaper comics, which combined simple line drawings with didactic captions. Woodman's style employs crosshatching for texture and depth, while the composition guides the reader's eye from the boy's grimy hands to the basin of water. Such educational comics were common in dailies and Sunday pages, reaching mass audiences and establishing visual conventions—panel borders, speech balloons, recurring characters—that would become the foundation of comic books.