Out Our Way

J.R. Williams's *Out Our Way* captures domestic comedy through a rural household scene: a boy hides from his mother after an April Fool's prank, while she confronts a mule that has invaded the family's storefront. The strip employs the visual vocabulary that newspaper comics had pioneered by the 1920s—multiple panels, speech balloons, and recurring family situations—to generate humor from character predicament rather than slapstick alone. Williams's loose, energetic pen style defines the everyday chaos of small-town American life. Syndicated strips like this one shaped the visual language and narrative structure that would become foundational to the comic book form.