New Jersey Angels

This comic strip exemplifies the single-panel gag format popular in newspapers before the sequential multi-panel strip became standard. The joke hinges on a child's literalism: when Aunt Mary mentions angels singing, young Johnnie reports they bit him instead. The pen-and-ink style with cross-hatching for shading was typical of newspaper illustration of the era. Such strips ran in Sunday and daily editions, establishing the visual conventions—speech balloons, expressive figure drawing, domestic settings—that would define American comics. The recurring characters and conversational humor reflect how newspapers used humor strips to build reader loyalty and drive circulation.