Life, 1925-08-06 · page 19 of 36
Life — August 6, 1925 — page 19: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes an early 20th-century automobile outing that goes hilariously wrong. The comic strip follows a group attempting a country picnic via car—a then-modern leisure activity. The sequence shows: people excitedly watching for "a good spot," the car full of passengers, someone warning "no place to leave the car," discovering an unsuitable pasture with "vicious looking cows," everyone catching colds ("Boogey! We'd all get colds or malaria"), and the final 3:30 PM scene showing the group huddled at an industrial site instead of a pastoral idyll. The satire mocks the gap between automobile-age leisure fantasies and messy reality—the promise of freedom and nature undercut by practical disasters, bad weather, dangerous livestock, and ending nowhere near an ideal picnic spot. It's humor about the vulnerability of early motorists and the difficulty of controlling recreational experiences.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
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