Soosie the Shopper

Four panels follow Soosie, a fashionable flapper, as she schemes to impress a golf date named Oswald. Lacking proper golf stockings, she draws diamond-pattern argyle onto her bare legs with an eyebrow pencil — a gag that pays off on the course when a sweltering sun forces her to mop her legs clean. The linework is spare and confident, the speech balloons densely packed with period slang, and the female lead drives every beat of the joke. Distributed by U.P.C. News Service, *Soosie* belongs to the daily newspaper strip tradition that directly seeded the comic book: syndicates bundled such pages into cheap reprints through the early 1930s, making recurring characters, sequential panels, and balloon dialogue the shared grammar every subsequent comics artist inherited.