Otto Watt

This comic strip by Barrie Payne exemplifies the Sunday newspaper format that emerged in the 1920s. The three-panel sequence follows Otto, who receives a new car—complete with radio—from his mother, only to have her demand he silence the device. The gag relies on visual escalation across panels: Otto's car grows increasingly elaborate and absurd, packed with equipment. Payne employs the formal grammar established by earlier cartoonists: bordered panels, speech balloons, and a recurring character in domestic situations. The strip's humor depends on readers' familiarity with radio as a novelty consumer good and the tensions between gift-giver and recipient. Newspaper comics of this era were the primary source of sequential visual narrative before the comic book format consolidated these Sunday pages into booklets.