ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Minute Movies: The Poor Beggar

· January 30, 1922

Minute Movies: The Poor Beggar
This *Minute Movies* strip condenses a Fuller Pathe Comedy into newspaper form, following a beggar's misadventures across six panels. The artist uses sequential framing, speech balloons, and visual gags—a pencil thrust into a hat, escalating chaos, a final punchline close-up—to deliver slapstick humor at a glance. *Minute Movies* bridged cinema and comics, translating film comedy into the newspaper strip's emerging visual language. The format's tight panels and rapid-fire action established conventions that would define comic strip vocabulary: clear panel progression, economical linework, and dialogue integrated with sight gags. Published during comics' formative years, such strips trained readers in the grammar of sequential art while promoting theatrical releases to the newspaper audience.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain