Our Friend Mush

By Ad Carter, *Our Friend Mush* follows a scrappy schoolboy through daily misadventures. Here, Mush returns home battered from a fight, spinning elaborate excuses to his parents while his friend attempts damage control. The strip employs the visual conventions of early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and sight gags built on physical comedy. Carter's loose linework and energetic compositions capture the rapid pacing of slapstick humor. Such strips populated the Sunday and daily papers of the 1910s–20s, establishing the visual and narrative vocabulary that would define American comics: the panel grid, expressive caricature, and serialized character-driven narratives that laid the foundation for the medium's later evolution into comic books.