Life, 1920-04-08 · page 3 of 44
Life — April 8, 1920 — page 3: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humorous cartoon about automobile tire failures. A man in a overcoat and fedora stands between a car with a blown-out Kelly-Springfield tire and a woman holding what appears to be a defective spare tire. The caption shows the woman (likely his wife) sarcastically chiding "Henry Wilson" for using profanity about the tire failure, then blaming him for cheapness—he bought an inferior tire when he had a Kelly-Springfield vehicle. The joke is that the man is trapped: he can't complain about the poor tire quality without admitting he purchased an inferior product. This advertisement-disguised-as-humor promotes Kelly-Springfield brand tires by humiliating owners of competing brands. The cartoon reflects 1920s consumer culture and the emerging importance of brand loyalty in automobile accessories.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Henry Wilson! How can you use such perfectly awful language’ It's your own fault, anyway, for starting out with that cheap tire when you had a Kelly-Springfield in the garage.” comicbooks.com