Salesman Sam

A six-panel Sunday comic strip following Sam's pitch to a customer. Sam proposes selling bottled heat with every article—one bottle per item—and escalates the scheme: three houses net three bottles, a hundred articles yield a hundred bottles, a thousand articles a thousand. The customer catches on: "If it's just th' same t' you, I'm doubtlin' things it is... Ship you to th' equator!" Artist Small's character-driven humor relies on repeated facial expressions and body language across panels, visual gags in backgrounds, and the economic absurdity of the sales pitch. The strip exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic's evolution into sophisticated sequential art—distinct panels advancing narrative, speech balloons clarifying action, and a recurring protagonist whose schemes and misfortunes drove reader loyalty in the 1920s dailies and weeklies that anchored the modern comic strip form.