Stranded on Tiny Island Cartoon with Message in a Bottle

by qubodup - uploaded on August 5, 2025, 9:28 pm

A man and a woman, both in ragged clothes, on a comedically tiny island with one palm tree. The barefoot man is ducking to collect a bottle with a message sticking out of it from the water. The woman in high heels is speaking. The caption reads: "Who's it for?"

Seems like a combination of Message in a Bottle trope and Dumb Blonde stereotype. And the "Far Side" Island trope, even though this comics predates it by miles.

Traced by qubodup in Illustrator using two passes. The result of the second pass was used for the 4 island and wave lines at the bottom, because the previous pass was dicing them into smaller pieces. Individual white backgrounds were removed.

The text is not the traced version, as the result is too ugly. I couldn't find a perfect font and the selection of public domain / CC0 fonts is meager. I used Seshat (CC0) from https://dotcolon.net/fonts/seshat/ (found via Fontlibrary.org) and applied a negative 15° Skew in Inkscape 1.4.2. Only a little manual cleanup to split the line from the guy's behind and getting rid of some 'sprinkle' artefacts from the tracing.

The cartoon strip is from Smiles issue 22, page 42. Hardie-Kelly. July 1947. Source: Comic Book Plus ( https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=79188 )

Minified with SVGOMG ( https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/ "Merge paths" disabled). Tags cleaned up with https://qubodup.github.io/tag-cleanup/