Giving the New Fords the Once Over

Will Rogers's syndicated comic strip combines visual comedy with social commentary. This Sunday installment uses the new Ford Model T as its anchor, with Rogers's characteristic deadpan humor deployed across multiple panels featuring recurring characters and detailed automotive gags. The strip's layout—combining single-column panels with larger scene-setting illustrations—exemplifies the visual storytelling conventions emerging in 1920s newspaper comics. Rogers's dialogue-heavy approach and reliance on topical subject matter (here, automobile design and pricing) made his strip a bridge between nineteenth-century newspaper humor and the modern comic page.