From the exhibition
Oh! Margy!
· May 17, 1925

John Held, Jr.'s *Oh! Margy!* exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic strip format that shaped modern cartooning. The strip follows a young woman's mishaps with equestrian pursuits across five sequential panels, each advancing the narrative through action and captioned gags. Held's clean linework and economical figure style—characteristic of 1920s illustration—conveys motion and personality through posture alone. The recurring character Margy and her slapstick predicaments reflect the Jazz Age comedy aesthetic. Newspaper strips like this established the visual vocabulary of comics: panel progression, visual continuity, and the integration of image and text that would define the medium for decades to come.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain