Judge — May 30, 1903 — page 16: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This is a six-panel comic strip satirizing the early automobile craze. A character identified as "Mobilized Mulcty" encounters an automobile in panel 1, then steals or acquires it through increasingly chaotic means across panels 2-5, culminating in a crash in panel 6. The satire targets working-class aspirations and the get-rich-quick mentality of the early 1900s. The title's irony—"he got his automobile all right"—undercuts this ambition; he obtains the car through criminal means, and it ends in disaster. The final caption mocks sensationalism: "an' dat's no newspaper lie, needer. I got mine!" The dialect suggests the character is depicted as working-class or immigrant. The joke reflects anxieties about rapid social mobility and automobile culture during the automobile industry's explosive growth period.