Out Our Way

A single-strip episode featuring Officer Ricks, absent for several days, discovered stuck in freshly laid cement on a city sidewalk. The humor derives from physical misfortune and the officer's stammering explanation of his predicament. The strip employs the visual conventions established by newspaper comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, and a recurring cast of characters in an urban setting. By the 1920s, newspaper dailies and Sunday pages had become the primary vehicle for comic narrative, establishing the panel layout and dialogue systems that would define the emerging medium. Artists working in strips during this period developed the visual grammar—composition, pacing, and character consistency—that became foundational to comic book storytelling.