ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Mr. Al Most

· January 7, 1912

Mr. Al Most
Gene Carr's *Mr. Al Most* strips the comedy down to physical slapstick and wordplay. In this Sunday page, the hero stumbles through a water-rescue scenario that spirals from one disaster into another—each panel builds on the last through visual continuity and speech balloons anchoring the gags. Carr's figure work captures motion mid-fall and mid-splash, hallmarks of early newspaper comic craft. The strip exemplifies how Sunday pages of this era paired ongoing characters with episodic mishaps, creating a formula that became foundational to comic book storytelling: recurring protagonist, sequential panels, escalating chaos, and sight gags that read across the page regardless of text.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain