It Beats the Keely Motor

This three-panel strip uses sequential visual narrative to construct a joke around perpetual motion—a recurring scientific obsession of the era. The top panel introduces a fashionable woman labeled "Georgia Girl"; the middle panel shows mechanical innards labeled "Ample Spice Gum"; the bottom panel depicts her in profile with arrows indicating motion, captioned "Down" and "Up." The final line reads: "Given the above factors the problem of perpetual motion is solved.—*Tid-Bits.* The strip demonstrates the newspaper comic's emerging visual grammar: numbered panels, speech and caption balloons, character recognizability, and the marriage of image and text to build toward a punchline. This format—drawn initially for Sunday supplements and dailies—would become foundational to comic book construction.