This full-page back-matter advertisement promotes Oi! Oi! I'm Leffing!, a 25-cent humor book sold by the E. I. Company of New York. The illustration centers on a broadly grinning, bespectacled cartoon figure clutching a booklet labeled De Wemfire; a smiling sun radiates behind him while a sketched cityscape fills the left margin. Bold red display type announces the city is 'shook with laughter.' The ad's dialect comedy — rooted in Lower East Side immigrant vernacular — represents a distinct strand of American popular humor that coexisted with the pulp adventure fiction surrounding it. Such advertisements funded the wood-pulp magazine industry, whose cheap pages carried the genre fiction that directly seeded the comic book form. Artist uncredited.
About this artifact
- Date
- c. 1928
- Rights
- Public domain — free to view, share, and reuse.
- Restoration
- Digitally restored and hosted by comicbooks.com.
Part of our mission to preserve and restore the public-domain heritage of the medium.