Hairbreadth Harry: "This Monarch Is a Democratic Cuss"

"Hairbreadth Harry" started in 1906 as a running parody of dime-novel melodrama, the boy hero forever pulling the fair Belinda from the clutches of the mustachioed villain Rudolph Rassendale, always one panel short of doom. This Sunday page from 1922 carries the subtitle "This Monarch Is a Democratic Cuss" and drops the cast into a seaside adventure of royalty, swimming, and narrow escape. Kahles was a workhorse who kept several strips running at once under different names, and Harry was the one that stuck, an early case of continuing story carried in the comics rather than a self-contained daily gag. The cliffhanger structure he spoofed here would, played straight, become the engine of the adventure strip a decade later.