Etta Kett

Paul Robinson's Etta Kett strips a teenage girl and her romantic entanglements. This four-panel sequence shows Etta in a car, flirting with a young man while her thoughts stray elsewhere—a common plot device. The strip uses visual conventions now standard to comics: speech balloons, thought clouds, sequential panels tracking action and dialogue. Etta Kett appeared in newspapers daily and Sundays, part of the comic strip boom that established recurring characters and serialized humor as mass entertainment. These strips, distributed by syndicates to hundreds of papers, created the vocabulary and panel layouts that would define comic books when they emerged in the 1930s.