Life, 1929-02-08 · page 19 of 44
Life — February 8, 1929 — page 19: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humorous instructional comic showing a woman devising an elaborate contraption to trick a child into eating spinach. The seven-panel sequence depicts increasingly absurd steps: filling a dueling pistol with gunpowder and spinach, ramming it tight, adding ice cream, attaching the pistol to a cord suspended above a dining table, and finally having "Junior" fire it into his mouth when his jaw drops to welcome the "ice cream." The satire targets two things: parents' struggles forcing nutritious but unpopular foods on children, and the era's faith in mechanical or pseudo-scientific "solutions" to everyday problems. The elaborate weaponized approach mocks overly complicated parenting advice while acknowledging the genuine difficulty of child nutrition.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
INTO AN OLD TIME DUELLING PISTOL PouR ky TEA- SPOON FULL PISTOL LEVEL FULL WITH SPINACH NEXY PLACE CONTENTS OF Yy PINT CONTAINER OF ICE CREAM ON THE SPOON 7. coct PISTOL AND HOLD I(N POSITION. JUNIOR. DOES THE REST WHEN HIS JAW DROPS To WELCOME THE (CE CREAM one Housenoin Hints on How to Feep tHe CHitpren Srinacn. TAHE LARGE TABLE SPOON AND FASTEN SaME To ToP OF PISTOL WITH CORD OR WIRE THEN CALL JUNIOR IN FOR DINNER mare LOOP witH NAPKIN AND PLACE IT UNDER HIS JAW comicbooks.com