The Brownie Clown of Brownietown

By 1907 the Brownies had a newspaper Sunday page of their own, "The Brownie Clown of Brownietown," and here the whole troupe piles into a red automobile for a run down a country road. Things go wrong in sequence: a cow blocks the way, a drove of pigs scatters, the car careens through the livestock while Brownies spill over the sides. Cox still sets a rhymed couplet beneath every panel, holding the storybook rhythm even as the format modernized around him into color comics and combustion engines. The automobile itself dates the page. What began in the 1880s as woodblock verse for children was now competing on the funnies page with Buster Brown and the Katzenjammers, and Cox met it with the same tidy, densely peopled panels.