Soosie the Shopper

A four-panel daily distributed by U.P.C. News Service, *Soosie the Shopper* follows a domestic comedy triangle: the scheming wife Soosie, her stout, long-suffering husband Mr. Wadd, and a hapless houseguest. Here Soosie dispatches Mr. Wadd for cheap cigars—two for a quarter—while she entertains a young caller; the cigars return as a literal knockout gag, flooring both men. Signed by Forbell and Floherty, the strip deploys confident brush linework, overlapping word balloons, and crisp panel gutters—the visual syntax newspaper syndicates had been standardizing since Outcault and McManus pioneered recurring characters and sequential storytelling in the 1890s–1900s. Those syndicated pages, not any single anthology, constitute the true origin point of the comic-book form.