Ophelia by Dwiggins

A single-panel comic strip by W.A. Dwiggins featuring a character with an oversized head containing chaotic imagery—books, figures, and abstract forms. She holds a volume titled "They Keep You Down if You Hain't Cultured," establishing the strip's premise: Ophelia, a self-styled philosopher whose pretensions to intellectual refinement drive the humor. Dwiggins employs exaggerated caricature and dense cross-hatching typical of early 20th-century newspaper comics. The composition uses the framing device of a portrait—a modernist touch—to contain the visual chaos representing her thoughts. This strip exemplifies the Sunday page format's embrace of satirical character-based humor and the emerging visual vocabulary of American comics, where speech balloons, expressive typography, and recurring personalities became the medium's foundation.