Out Our Way

A single-panel gag strip featuring a man struggling with a stubborn mule. The humor pivots on the man's complaint about the animal's appetite—he laments that the mule eats every time he reaches for his hat. The strip's hand-lettered dialogue captures vernacular speech, while the artist's precise pen line defines both animal anatomy and human gesture. By the early 1920s, such daily comic panels had become standard newspaper fare, establishing recurring situations and stock characters that would shape commercial comic art. The panel format—single or multi-cell—allowed artists to develop a visual language of exaggeration and timing that translated seamlessly into the comic books that followed.