Going Our Way

When I was a child, one of the first comic strips that totally enthralled me wasn't anything I read in the pages of the Rome News-Tribune or the Atlanta Journal. Instead, it was a strip that was published decades before I was born. I found J.R. Williams' "Out Our Way" in a collected volume on my parents' bookshelf; it was the only book they had that seemed to be entirely comic art, so I was instantly hooked. I fell in love with Williams' meticulous line work, and was intrigued by his view of the not-so-Old West... a view that stripped away the mythic Western elements and pointed out the mundanities and ironies of life in the West.

It's funny--I haven't seen this book in forty or more years, but I can still see Williams' lovely linework (an ink style that seems to have influenced Frank Frazetta's work, in fact). There are no mass-market collections of Williams' work that I know of--but there should be. He's too good to be forgotten, as this one panel so aptly illustrates.