August 26, 2005
‘So, long, you corpulent shrimp!’
Via BoingBoing: Somebody has scanned and uploaded 80 episodes, if that’s the right word, of the pre-First World War comic strip The Outbursts of Everett True. True is sort of Ko-Ko from the Mikado (‘I've got a little list/Of society offenders who might well be underground/And who never would be missed!’) played by Don Cherry:
The setup of the strip is extremely simple, in that wonderful turn-of-the-(last)-century way. In the first panel, Everett is subjected to one of the many common annoyances, indignations, and outrages that are foisted upon each of us daily.
In the second, he beats someone up.
And the rest just writes itself, folks! That's a mark of genius, as far as I'm concerned: find a great concept and work it ad infinitum, into myriad variations on a theme. The fun is in the extraordinary variety of both offenses and ways to punish them.
We need a 21st-century Everett, if only for the pleasure of watching him throw spammers into horse-troughs or claw-footed bathtubs, but the pests of our own age work from behind defences.
