Otto Watt

A single-panel gag by Barrie Payne featuring Otto Watt, a character whose name puns on electrical units. The strip shows a man speaking into a megaphone to a woman, explaining his horse's poor racing performance through increasingly technical jargon—"convolusion first, suburban second, reliable scratched-eek, crater-pop." The woman's deadpan response—"you ought to be, you've had enough practice!"—delivers the punchline. This style of newspaper comic, appearing in Sunday editions and dailies throughout the 1920s, relied on visual gags, speech balloons, and recurring characters. Such strips established the visual and narrative conventions that would become foundational to comic books: panel layout, character design, and the marriage of image and text.