Minute Movies

Ed Wheelan's *Minute Movies* strips compressed film plots into newspaper comic format, bringing Hollywood narratives to daily readers. This panel sequence introduces character types familiar from silent cinema: the plain-faced hero Dick Dare, the scheming villain, and the ingénue Hazel Dearie. Wheelan employed the visual vocabulary emerging from 1920s comics—sequential panels, speech balloons, close-ups of faces—to create narrative momentum across a narrow strip. By translating studio storytelling into newspaper space, *Minute Movies* demonstrated how comics could function as an independent medium while drawing audiences hungry for cinematic content in printed form.