The Wasp — 1893 — page 129: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This six-panel comic strip depicts a romantic courtship that progressively deteriorates. It begins with a burglar impressed by a "promising" apartment (panel 1), escalates through a woman announcing a visitor and the burglar's formal proposal to her mother (panels 2-4), then descends into chaotic violence—a physical fight among multiple people with furniture overturned (panel 5), ending with complete destruction and debris scattered across the room (panel 6). The humor appears to satirize overly romantic, flowery courtship customs of the era by showing how dramatically they can collapse into domestic chaos. The burglar protagonist adds absurdist humor, suggesting the satire extends to critiquing artificial social pretenses about romance and propriety.