Otto Watt

By Barrie Payne, *Otto Watt* exemplifies the newspaper comic strip format that directly preceded the modern comic book. The strip uses panel layouts and speech balloons—visual conventions that became the foundation of sequential art. Here, a radio broadcast announcing a baseball score interrupts a lecture on tapioca birds, creating humor through timing and visual communication across discrete panels. Such strips appeared daily and Sunday in newspapers nationwide, reaching millions of readers and establishing the visual language—panel division, word-balloon placement, character design—that cartoonists would refine into the comic book medium of the 1930s onward.