The Wasp — 1893 — page 395: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This comic strip from *The Wasp* satirizes incompetent horsemanship at Santa Cruz. The sequential narrative shows a rider's escalating misadventures: the horse refuses to move ("The dare"), the rider struggles to mount ("Come on, old boy"), loses control during a ride ("I'll ride him into it"), and ultimately crashes near a hotel entrance ("Bad lights at present"). The humor targets the rider's persistent clumsiness and the horse's resistance rather than any specific political figure. It's a straightforward slapstick comedy about human-animal conflict and urban incompetence—the kind of visual humor *The Wasp* frequently employed. The Santa Cruz location suggests this may reference a local incident or common problem tourists encountered there.