Petting Patty

A four-panel strip by Jefferson Machamer featuring a young woman in a bathing suit on a beach. The narrative follows her conversation with a man as she explains her summer job and expresses concerns about social scandal. Machamer uses sequential panels with speech balloons to advance the gag, a visual language now fundamental to comics. The strip exemplifies the newspaper comic form that emerged in the early twentieth century—daily and Sunday installments featuring recurring characters and sight gags that made comics a mass medium. Machamer's figure drawing and line work reflect the style conventions of comic illustration in the Jazz Age.