One Sheet: The Sad Housewife, by Roach

One Sheet is a series about single objects from the boxes.

“Home Sweet Home”

That’s the caption. There is no wink, no punchline, no arrow pointing at the joke. Just a woman who looks finished, and three words that mean the opposite of what they say.

It came from Roach Studios — the same printer that gave us motorcycles, the Pink Panther, and a marijuana catalogue.

It isn’t alone

We went into these boxes expecting rock bands and muscle cars. We came out with six sheets about women’s lives:

• “A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle” — and the same joke a second time, differently worded
• “Housework’s a Bitch”
• “I’d Rather Be 40 Than Pregnant”
• Cathy, from the first widely syndicated American strip by a woman about a single working woman
• And this

None of them was printed as politics. They were printed because they sold.

Where it hung

A few feet from “Beer Drinkers Make Better Lovers” and “If the Beer Doesn’t Kill Me, My Wife Will.”

The wall carried both sides of an argument simultaneously and never noticed it was doing so. Which is exactly what makes it useful now — nobody was curating, so nothing got tidied away.

At $15 this is one of the cheapest sheets we hold. We think it’s one of the more important ones.

See the sheet · The fish and the bicycle