From the exhibition
Oh! Margy!
· March 8, 1925
John Held, Jr.'s *Oh! Margy!* captures the visual lexicon of 1920s flapper culture through comic strip language. The strip uses sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters—formal innovations inherited from newspaper comics' pioneers—to build jokes through escalating absurdity. Margy's observations about fashion (snake hips, elephant garters, the red-hot pash) anchor sight gags featuring exaggerated anatomy and a wisecracking black cat. Held's line work, economical and expressive, typifies the graphic shorthand that made Sunday comics instant popular entertainment. The strip exemplifies how newspaper comics standardized visual narrative before the comic book format emerged.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain
