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I love these comic pages. Pages of humorous drawings, doggerel, and illustrated captions, they hearken back to the heyday of humor weeklies like Puck, Punch, and Life. I get the feeling that newspapers ran them as a bulwark against the encroaching dawn of the comic strip, a format that many felt was vulgar and classless. These comic pages, on the other hand, were familiar and possessed of some kind of patina of respectability, owing to their provenance in magazine publishing. There was clearly a popular demand for comics in newspapers, but editors were loathe to sully their pages with mere strips; these pages, one imagines they hoped, would satiate this public that didn’t know what was good for it.

Well, we know how that turned out! And while my first love will always be the comic strip as it would come to be, I really get a kick out of these old pages from a transitional time. I hope you will enjoy them, too!