Enthrall to Enslave

A clergyman pronounces a couple man and wife in Frank L. Stanton's Illustrating Webster, a humor strip that ran in the New York Evening World. The gag plays on Webster's definition of "enthrall"—the minister's formal words binding the couple in matrimony also mean to enslave. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comics' visual vocabulary: speech balloons, domestic setting, character expressions, and linguistic wordplay. Published in the Press Publishing Company's evening edition, such strips were weekly features that helped establish the sequential art form's conventions before the rise of comic books proper.