Soosie the Shopper

Four panels trace a small confidence trick at a soda fountain. Soosie, a stylishly dressed woman, sits beside her companion Oswald and complains that her soda is too weak. She twice charms the clerk—'Sure, miss'—into adding more syrup, then more soda, until the glasses are full to the brim. In the final panel she announces that it was her treat all along, having extracted two generously topped-up sodas for the price of one. The strip is syndicated by U.P.C. News Service and signed by Forbell and Floherty. Its clean ink line, counterpoint of seated and standing figures, and brisk speech-balloon rhythm represent the daily newspaper strip at peak efficiency—the same compressed sequential grammar that, collected into pamphlets through the 1930s, would become the comic book itself.