Cartoon Inspiration

I've no way of proving it but I’m pretty sure Wilhelm Busch (1832-1908) inspired cartoon directors to put in motion a lot of visual gags he had worked out years before in print. The posting I’m showing isn’t very good, you may want to click on the image to enlarge it, but you can clearly see gags that are now considered cliché. There is the steamroller gag where a character is pan caked into a silhouette, an eye pop ‘take’, multiple limbs and digits, enlarged body parts and a morph into one large eye to show surprise. Busch is already recognized as the inspiration for the comic strip “The Katzenjammer Kids” but I suspect he inspired the Avery’s and the Clampetts as well.