ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Outbursts of Everett True

· 1907

Outbursts of Everett True
A two-panel gag strip depicting a domestic scene in a motel room. In the top panel, a man presents a mousetrap to his wife, Mrs. True, confident it will catch mice. The bottom panel reveals the trap's spectacular failure: Mrs. True has been caught instead, tangled in the mechanism alongside scattered clothing and debris, while her husband looks on in dismay. The strip employs sequential panels and speech balloons to build comedic timing through cause and effect—visual grammar that became standard in newspaper comics. *Outbursts of Everett True*, created by James Swinnerton, ran as a daily strip featuring domestic humor and slapstick situations that appealed to early-twentieth-century newspaper audiences.

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