Etta Kett

Paul Robinson's Etta Kett followed a young working woman through romantic mishaps and domestic comedy. The strip employs the visual conventions pioneered in early newspaper comics: bordered panels, speech balloons advancing plot and gag, and recurring characters in episodic situations. Here Etta navigates a love triangle, with overlapping dialogue establishing the confusion. The artwork uses spot blacks and crosshatching typical of dailies reproduction. Etta Kett ran as both a daily strip and Sunday feature, exemplifying how newspaper comics developed a visual grammar—panel sequencing, figure poses suggesting movement and emotion—that would directly influence the comic books emerging in the 1930s.