Otto Watt

Otto Watt, by Barrie Payne, presents a child and an adult in a magic trick setup across two panels. The magician promises to pull any named object from a horn—with a catch for cats. When the child names a cat, the magician produces an actual feline in the second panel, creating a visual gag around the trick's impossible premise. The strip employs the standard newspaper comic format: sequential panels, speech balloons, and simple line work. This 1925 strip exemplifies the daily newspaper comic's role in developing visual storytelling conventions that would form the foundation of comic books, where recurring characters, sight gags, and panel-to-panel narrative became the medium's defining language.