ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Outbursts of Everett True

· March 13, 1909

Outbursts of Everett True
A two-panel Sunday strip featuring the irascible Everett True, protagonist of one of the era's most popular newspaper comics. The top panel introduces True observing a street lamp with characteristic smugness; below, his practical joke backfires spectacularly as the lamp explodes, sending him sprawling. The strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary that newspaper comics inherited from nineteenth-century satirical prints: sequential panels, speech balloons, dynamic figure work, and physical slapstick. *Everett True* ran in syndication from 1905 onward, establishing True as a stock type—the urban troublemaker—whose anarchic behavior and comeuppances entertained millions of daily readers across America.

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