Sidney Smith - The Gumps - 10-26-34

I confess to not knowing very much about The Gumps, one of those strips that seems to have been immensely popular and long-running, and still well known among comic strip aficionados, but which has left little direct imprint on the culture, Andy Gump's tag line "Oh Min!" would elicit blank stares today (though isn't an "Andy Gump" a kind of portable toilet? Maybe not the most enviable cultural imprint, but still something I guess). But anyway, still an important newspaper strip in its day. This is a pretty marginal example, I suppose, without the central characters: I have no idea who this character is or what's going on here. One thing that seems typical is that it was a very dialogue heavy strip. And of course it displays that classic "big foot" style (though no feet are to be seen), and the wonderful loose brush-stroke shading that Smith spatters here and there to fill up blank spaces. My favorite detail: the little caption "Bills" with an arrow that tells the reader what that inconspicuous pile of papers in panel 2 represents.