Out Our Way

Out Our Way
J. R. Williams' Out Our Way (November 5, 1944)
Author(s)	J. R. Williams (1922–1957)
Current status / schedule	ended
Launch date	March 20, 1922
End date	1977
Alternate name(s)	Born Thirty Years Too Soon, Heroes Are Made, Not Born, Bull of the Woods, Why Mothers Get Gray, The Worry Wart
Syndicate(s)	Newspaper Enterprise Association
Genre(s)	Humor

Out Our Way was an American single-panel comic strip series by Canadian-American comic strip artist J. R. Williams. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association, the cartoon series was noted for its depiction of American rural life and the various activities and regular routines of families in small towns. The panel introduced a cast of continuing characters, including the cowboy Curly and ranch bookkeeper Wes. Out Our Way ran from 1922–1977, at its peak appearing in more than 700 newspapers.

Out Our Way first appeared in a half-dozen small-market newspapers on March 20, 1922.

Williams used Out Our Way as an umbrella title for several alternating series, including The Bull of the Woods and Why Mothers Get Gray.

The success of the daily panel prompted a Sunday feature, but it was not a grouping of panels, as in the Sunday Grin and Bear It. Instead, the characters of Why Mothers Get Gray were expanded into a Sunday strip, Out Our Way with the Willits (aka The Willets). Williams' assistants on the Sunday strip were Neg Cochran and George Scarbo (whose own strip The Comic Zoo sometimes ran next to The Willets as a Sunday sidebar feature).

In 1957, Williams died at age 70.Out Our Way was continued by Cochran, Paul Gringle, Ed Sullivan and others until 1977.

The content of Out Our Way was based on Williams' own life experiences, as noted by Michael H. Price in the Fort Worth Business Press:

Cartooning can become a higher art, if motivated by urges greater than rattling off an easy gag or beating the next deadline. Thus do any perceived barriers between Charlie Russell and J.R. Williams prove irrelevant. Williams’ mass-consumption newspaper cartoons come from a font of artistry and inspiration as deep and personal as anything that drove Russell. Jim Williams’ Out Our Way is the great masterpiece of cowboy cartooning, surviving in obscurity for an eventual rediscovery. The feature draws upon the writer-artist’s personal background as a muleskinner (and industrial machinist, and prizefighter, and family man) in ways that make the individual episodes — each self-contained panel suggesting a larger story — as resonant today as when new... “It was just this little knack I’d developed for drawing things,” Williams told The Saturday Evening Post in 1953. “Nobody outside the bunkhouse or the machine shop had ever seemed to want my style of small-town humor, but I was too stubborn to give up.” By the 1950s, Out Our Way had attracted a readership in the millions. Williams’ range of experiences, coupled with a gentle sarcasm and a keen observational sense, made his work unique. He tapped into the commonplace happenings of everyday life — childhood in a small town, the earthy humor that lightens the rigors of ranch life and the factory floor — and became an entertaining chronicler of a day before the 20th Century had come of age.