Sunday, October 9, 2022

Canard of Careless Walking in Comic Strip from 1922

100 years ago, the morning paper ran a strip satirizing the canard of "careless walking." Titled "Experience Don't Count Here," it was a gag about a driver accused of hitting and injuring a person on foot.

About the strip, "Squire Edgegate," there's not much online. It was distributed nationally, and not a local production. One historian sums it saying 

The strip about a country judge/attorney (his job description was a bit fluid) was drawn simply, and the gags were simple, too. There wasn't anything really wrong about the strip, but there wasn't much particularly right about it either.

The gag here does give the last word to the person on foot. Note also the subject of the action: "you struck this man with your auto." No erasing the driver.

Panel 1

Panel 2

Panel 3

Panel 4

The main topics here of transportation and land use rarely appear in the comics, so there hasn't been much occasion to comment on them. The simple gags often punched down, and have not seemed revealing in any interesting way about culture and society. They employed common bias and stereotype, often reinforcing rather than critiquing. 

Still, the comic displayed some skepticism about autoist entitlement.

Panels 3 and 4

Here's part of a different one about getting out of a speeding ticket. The gag reveals the limit exceeded can't have been more than 20mph!

(See also this comic from 1919 on the sources of traffic "accidents.")

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