Outbursts of Everett True

A single-panel comic strip featuring the title character Everett True, an irascible man threatening a young boy over a request to light a cigarette. The exaggerated facial expressions and physical comedy—True's bulbous frame, the boy's shocked reaction—anchor the humor in character type and slapstick threat. The speech balloon, a standard device by 1908, carries the entire joke. Everett True ran as a daily strip in newspapers and became one of the period's popular recurring characters, exemplifying how newspaper comics developed visual shorthand: the grotesque body, the expressive face, the word-and-image partnership that defined early cartooning before the comic book medium emerged from these Sunday and daily features.