How Do They Do It?

This Sunday comic strip uses sequential panels and speech balloons to explore working-class financial struggles during the early twentieth century. The narrative follows a tenant's attempts to pay rent while avoiding an unsympathetic landlord, then shifts to show how landlords actually collect funds—through persistent demands and forced credit arrangements. The final panel invites reader participation, a common device in newspaper comics of the era. The strip demonstrates the visual language that newspapers had developed by 1917: panel borders to guide eye movement, varied compositions to control pacing, and recurring character types. Such strips appeared in Sunday papers nationwide, reaching millions of readers and establishing the formal grammar that would define comic books for decades.