Dawes to Replace Me in The Follies

Will Rogers's comic strip combines topical humor with the visual conventions of 1920s newspaper comics. Here Rogers riffs on Vice President Charles G. Dawes, using exaggerated caricature and sight gags—a figure tumbling from a boat, broad gestures, and crisp linework typical of the Sunday page format. The strip's layout chains panels left to right, with speech balloons anchoring jokes to recurring characters. Rogers's strip exemplifies how newspaper comics absorbed vaudeville timing and political satire, translating stand-up comedy into sequential art. The daily and Sunday strips were the primary laboratory where American comic artists developed panel-to-panel narrative and character-driven humor before the comic book medium emerged in the 1930s.