ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

I Always Say—(Sez Gracie Allen)

· circa 1920s–1930s

I Always Say—(Sez Gracie Allen)
This single-panel comic strip features Gracie Allen, the vaudeville performer and radio personality, in a humorous domestic scenario. A rotund gentleman displays a watch with a photograph pasted inside—not of his wife, but of the watch itself, serving as a visual pun on ownership and memory. The strip's economy of line and exaggerated character proportions exemplify the cartooning style that shaped early newspaper comics. Allen's name anchored the strip to her popular stage persona, a common practice that merged entertainment celebrities with comic page content during the interwar period, when newspaper comics were establishing themselves as a distinct medium with recurring characters and visual gags.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain