Starting in the 1920s, as car ownership grew by leaps and bounds and better roads were being built all over the country, car accidents became a major and deadly problem.
Originally chartered to foster workplace safety in 1913, the National Safety Council expanded its mission to highway safety in the 1920s. The organization offered free material to newspapers, often in the form of cartoon series, to educate drivers -- or at least scold them -- about proper driving habits. One of their many series was Safety Sonnets, which offered twenty of what I call 'before-and-after' two panel cartoons by Sid Hix. The series was issued in November 1938. Though intended as a daily series, papers of course usually ran the little 1-column feature on an ROP basis.
Sid Hix (whose real name was spelled Hicks) was an interesting cartoonist. He specialized in advertising cartoons; though his work was seen in newspapers and magazines quite constantly from the 1930s to 1950s, as best I can tell he never got the bug to create a syndicated feature of his own -- he preferred that advertisers foot the bill for his print appearances. Nice work if you can get it!
Hix had a pleasant and lively style but he was also adept at aping other styles if clients requested something different. Safety Sonnets is an instance where he used what I think of as his native style.
This is right around the time that Burma-Shave billboards started incorporating traffic safety messages. Those were in a variety of meters, but including (kind of) dactyls as in these cartoons ("Keep well / To the right / Of the oncoming car / Get your close shaves / From the half pound jar / Burma-Shave").
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