Her Plan of Attack

Gibson sets a man and woman on what appears to be a beach or sandy ground strewn with a book, lumber scraps, and an overturned pail — the debris of some shared project abandoned mid-argument. The man, lean and suited, leans forward from a folding camp chair with clenched fist and knit brow; the woman, in a tailored jacket and fashionable broad-brimmed hat, sits on the ground gesturing outward with an air of cool, instructive authority. Two empty chairs frame them like a stage. The title, drawn from the illustration's catalog record as accompanying 'Stranger Than Fiction,' frames the scene as comic gender inversion: she is the strategist, he the bewildered subordinate. Gibson's signature line-work gives her the composed confidence of his iconic 'Gibson Girl' type — self-possessed, slightly amused, entirely in command.