J.R. Williams burst from obscurity onto hundreds, maybe even thousands, of newspapers in 1922 with his daily Out Our Way panel, syndicated by the ubiquitous blanket service syndicate, NEA. It’s hard to believe that the creator of a three year old feature could make headline news simply by signing his next contract, but such was the instant popularity of Out Our Way. Of course it didn’t hurt that NEA supplied the promo piece with the rest of their service, but still, editors had to make the decision to actually run it, and quite a few did.
This piece ran in the October 23 1925 edition of the Dubuque Times-Journal, but a digital search finds it running in lots of other venues, from New Jersey to Alabama, Louisiana to Washington state.
In the 1920s-30s,NEA would often put in puffy little space fillers to promote their strips right on the proof sheets sent to clients, others about Williams accentuate his cowboy origins, with him decked out in western regalia.