Nobody by Meek

A two-panel gag strip in which a well-dressed stranger offers a laborer $500 to perform an unstated task. When asked his name, the stranger replies "Nobody"—a setup that pays off in the second panel when the worker, having agreed, swings his bat and says "Nobody!!" as his assailant flees. The strip uses sequential panels and speech balloons to establish character, proposition, and punchline, employing visual comedy and wordplay typical of early newspaper comic strips. Such dailies, which appeared in papers across America in the 1910s, established the fundamental grammar of comics: distinct panels showing progression of action, dialogue in balloons, and recurring visual gags that readers anticipated and discussed.