Pocket Cartoon Course: Lessons 15–17

These three instructional panels teach fundamental cartooning technique through demonstration and direct address. Lesson 15 covers shadow use—showing how dark shapes anchor figures and convey depth—while Lesson 16 focuses on lettering consistency and the importance of establishing character identity through speech balloon placement. Lesson 17 presents political mascots: the G.O.P. elephant and Democratic donkey, stock symbols that appeared across American newspaper comics and editorial pages. The strips employ the visual language that defined early comic instruction: recurring student figures, panel borders, diagrams, and didactic speech to break down professional methods. Such tutorial comics, published in periodicals and collected anthologies, helped train a generation of cartoonists in the grammar of sequential art.