Minute Movies: 'The Crafty Doctor'

This *Minute Movies* strip condenses a complete narrative into six panels, a format pioneered by cartoonist Wheelan in the early 1920s. Ralph Meredies plays a scheming physician who exploits a patient's medical emergency for profit, extracting absurd fees and manipulating a telephone operator for access to his prey. The strip's economy of line and sequential clarity—speech balloons advancing plot, facial expressions conveying intent, panel borders guiding the eye—exemplifies the visual grammar newspapers standardized during comics' first decades. *Minute Movies* appeared in syndication as daily entertainment, delivering slapstick and social observation in compact form, establishing conventions the emerging comic book medium would inherit and expand.