H. E. Butzin Among the 'White Wings'

This Sunday strip follows H. E. Butzin, a street sweeper ('White Wing'), through four panels of nautical mishap and recovery. Panel one establishes the character in his daily work; panel two escalates chaos when wind and water send him overboard from a small vessel; panel three captures the physical comedy of drowning and rescue with onomatopoeia ('GLUG! GLUG!'); panel four resolves the gag with dry humor about his escape. The strip employs the visual vocabulary pioneered by earlier newspaper comics—sequential panels, word balloons, expressive line work—to build comedic momentum. Butzin's recurring-character format and working-class setting reflect the newspaper Sunday pages that defined early-twentieth-century comic storytelling, the direct ancestors of the comic book form.