thumb|Four elephants examine an orange or a dead point position by a billiard game
Droodles was a syndicated cartoon feature created by Roger Price and collected in his 1953 book Droodles, though the term is now used more generally of similar visual riddles.
Form
The general form is minimal: a square box containing a few abstract pictorial elements with a caption (or several) giving a humorous explanation of the picture's subject. For example, a Droodle depicting three concentric shapeslittle circle, medium circle, big squaremight have the caption "Aerial view of a cowboy in a Port-a-john."
thumb|Aerial view of a cowboy in a Port-a-john
Origins
The trademarked name "Droodle" suggests "doodle", "drawing" and "riddle". However, the form of the droodlea riddle expressed in visual formhas earlier roots, for example in a drawing (indovinelli grafici) by the Italian painter Agostino Carracci (1557–1602), and the term is widely used beyond Price's work.
Droodles are (or were) purely a form of entertainment like any other nonsense cartoon and appeared in roughly the same places (newspapers, paperback collections, bathroom walls) during their heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. The commercial success of Price's collections of Droodles led to the founding of the publishing house Price-Stern-Sloan, and also to the creation of a Droodles-themed game show, Droodles, on NBC in 1954. Series of newspaper advertisements for the News and Max brands of cigarettes featured cigarette-themed Droodles.