Newspaper Bromides

A single-panel gag strip featuring a man defending himself against a bucket of water with a ladder, illustrating the phrase "He took the stand in his own defense." The cartoon plays on the double meaning of "stand"—legal testimony versus physical stance—a verbal pun rendered through physical comedy. Published during the height of the newspaper comic strip era, when dailies and Sunday pages introduced recurring characters, speech balloons, and sequential panel layouts that would become the visual foundation of comic books. Such one-off gag strips appeared alongside continuing narratives, establishing the medium's formal vocabulary.