American Invention for Blowing Up Bosses

This Puck cover deploys the visual vocabulary of satirical chromolithography at the peak of late-19th-century newspaper cartooning. A device labeled "Free Public Common Sense"—a bomb shaped like a human brain—sits at the center, aimed upward at exploding capitalists and bosses tumbling through the air. The cartoon's composition uses spatial hierarchy and exaggerated caricature to mock the anxieties of America's industrial class. Such illustrations filled Sunday papers and weeklies, establishing the conventions—expressive linework, symbolic imagery, sequential absurdity—that would define early comic strips and the visual grammar of comics itself.