Judge, 1936-12 · page 10 of 53
Judge — December 1936 — page 10: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Analysis: "Tomorrow's Novel" This is a satirical piece mocking the overwrought, pseudoscientific melodrama popular in pulp fiction and romance novels of the era. The cartoon illustrates a dramatic scene—a man and woman in a romantic/violent confrontation—while the text parodies how such stories obsessively explain every character action through pseudo-medical jargon. The satire works by having the narrative constantly interrupt the romance plot to discuss thyroid conditions, calcium deposits, pituitary sources, and neurological connections—turning a simple domestic drama into absurd medical pseudo-analysis. The joke is that contemporary popular fiction treated medical/psychological explanations as profound justifications for melodramatic behavior. The caption's clichéd romantic promise ("cottage...Ford V8") contrasts with the preceding violence, further mocking genre conventions. The piece ridicules both pulp fiction's dramatic excess and the era's tendency to pathologize normal human emotion through pseudo-science.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Lewis declares that u livelihood on the practice of « lair THE HUSH of early evening fell softly over the countryside as Angela moodily, 1 probably in simple ‘epression but with incipient melancholia symptoms, walked to her front gate. In the soft twilight her dark eyes, passion lit, the despair of the youth of the whole countryside, were luminous, in fact almost bulging with a clear thyroid Although handicapped by the slight astigmatic implication. condition so often associated with the effect of excessive thyroid activity, she caught the slight movement up the road. With a low cry she ran forward, Even before she could distinguish his features she knew him by the slight limp, the re- sult of a calcium deposit at the left knee due entirely to careless setting of a simple fracture and subsequent neglect of the case. It was Jimmy! iters should depend for their prine TOMORROW'S NOVEL another profession, such as that of medicine— With a low sob, characteristic of the hypersensitivity so often found in such cases but traced to pituitary sources, she Darling!” darling, 1 threw herself into his arms, cried. “Oh, thought you never, never, would cor Yes," he snarled, “I'm here! And as for you, you she Jimmy Jimmy pushed her away. can go plumb to hell! I seen you and Luke Turner last night, down on the lower forty. I want no damned truck He hauled off and pasted her one on the right mandible. with such as you! Angela backed up. Considering the force of the blow, it was her only But as she backed, she under- almost to a pocket of course went a reaction amountin; She reached into th her leather jacket reflex Her fingers closed around the cold steel. As she lifted it, Jimmy looked at her with horror in his He stood frozen, rooted to the ground eyes The calcium deposit would handicap a sudden spring. Yet what else could he do? Angela's right arm moved slowly upward. She was perfectly calm. The thyroid condi- tion seemed vir He crouched lly to disappear. Once the period of stress was relieved it would reappear in aggravated form: ex. treme nervousness running to garru- lousness, even incoherence; the extended cyes and other usual symptoms. But it is interesting to note that these periods of relief, following extreme emotional stress, might last as long as two or three weeks. action, it seems to me, might easily indicate a This arrested definite connection between the thyroid and the posterior motor centers of the cerebellum, a deduction in which I am indebted, in part at least, to that splendid paper by Dr. Horace H. Hawthorne in which he relates the case of “Miss X.” Angela fired "Think of it, dear—some day—you and I—in a little cottage on the rear end of a Ford V8.” comicbooks.com