Soosie the Shopper

A four-panel daily strip by Fordell & Floherty, *Soosie the Shopper* follows a young woman and her spaniel through a comic mishap with a delivery truck from "The Big Store." Neighbors speculate the truck carries a new dining-room set; movers struggle with a large crate while the dog tangles underfoot; the gag lands on Soosie tendering a $20 bill for a 19-cent purchase, forcing an embarrassed return. The linework is crisp pen-and-ink in the house style of 1920s syndicated dailies — the very strips that taught readers to follow sequential panels left-to-right, absorb speech balloons as character voice, and invest in recurring protagonists. Those conventions, refined across hundreds of such strips, were the direct template editors repackaged as the first comic books in the early 1930s.