Soosie the Shopper

Four horizontal panels follow a telephone ruse gone sideways. In panel one, a large, elaborately dressed woman instructs a servant to say she is out; panel two shows her impersonating her own mother on the phone to a caller named Mrs. Kale; panel three has her laying on flattery thick as frosting; in the punchline panel she returns home to find Mrs. Kale seated in her parlor. The strip is signed *Forbell & Florerty*. Daily newspaper strips like this one — short, character-driven, wordplay-dependent — were the direct seedbed of the comic book: syndicates packaged reprints of such pages into proto-anthology formats through the late 1920s and 1930s, translating the four-panel grammar of recurring characters and speech balloons into the bound pamphlet form that defined American comics for a century.