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From the exhibition

Oh! Margy!

· January 18, 1925

Oh! Margy!
John Held, Jr.'s *Oh! Margy!* captures the humor of Jazz Age courtship through sequential narrative. The strip follows Margy's romantic entanglement: she promises to wear a fraternity pin as a sacred token, only to discover her suitor Frank gave identical pins to other girls. The final panels show her oath literally coming true—she becomes a living display case of pins. Held employs the visual vocabulary established by earlier newspaper strips: panel borders, speech balloons, and a recurring cast. His line work emphasizes period fashion—drop waists, rolled stockings, bobbed hair—while exaggerated proportions and gesture convey physical comedy. The strip's episodic structure and character-driven situations typify the Sunday funnies that preceded and shaped the modern comic book form, establishing how sequential art could sustain narrative tension across multiple frames.

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