Oh! Margy!

John Held, Jr.'s *Oh! Margy!* follows a young woman's return from abroad through customs inspection. The strip's visual economy—sequential panels, expressive line work, and speech balloons anchoring narrative flow—exemplifies the visual grammar newspaper comics had codified by the 1920s. Held's flapper protagonist, rendered in his characteristic angular style, carries the humor across four frames: the setup (luggage inspection by a familiar official), the complication (her extensive wardrobe revealed), and the payoff (mutual embarrassment). This daily strip format, distributed nationally through syndication, helped establish recurring characters and situational comedy as the foundation of American comic narrative before the comic book medium emerged.