Square Door Knobs Shown at Auto Show

Will Rogers's comic strip, syndicated in newspapers during the 1920s, satirizes automotive innovations at a contemporary auto show. The strip employs the visual conventions that defined newspaper comics: multiple panels arranged in grid sequence, speech balloons containing dialogue and commentary, and recurring character types. Rogers combines sight gags—a car door knob styled as an Egyptian artifact—with topical humor about consumer culture and industrial design. The strip exemplifies how daily and Sunday newspaper comics functioned as visual laboratories where artists developed the sequential art techniques that would become foundational to the comic book form: panel transitions, character consistency, and the integration of text and image into unified narrative sequences.