Outbursts of Everett True

A two-panel domestic comedy featuring the irascible Everett True and his wife. In the first panel, True's wife asks how long he'll spend priming the hand pump before they head downtown. True, already cranking vigorously, begins to respond—then in the second panel, a water jet launches him backward with explosive force. The strip employs the essential vocabulary of newspaper comics: sequential panels showing cause and effect, speech balloons advancing the narrative, and exaggerated physical comedy. *Outbursts of Everett True*, which ran in the early 1900s, helped establish the visual grammar that would define American comic strips and eventually the comic book form itself.