Billy Bounce

A Sunday newspaper comic strip by W. W. Denslow featuring Billy Bounce, a mischievous character who stages Revolutionary War tableaux for Washington's Birthday. The strip demonstrates early comics vocabulary: numbered panels, speech balloons, recurring protagonist, and sequential gags building to a climactic finale. Denslow, known for his illustrations in *The Wonderful Wizard of Oz*, helped establish the visual grammar of newspaper comics. Each panel presents a tableau—Billy as Washington crossing the Delaware, as General Putnam, as Benedict Arnold—culminating in an anarchic battle scene. The strip's layout, pacing, and character-driven humor exemplify the Sunday page format that bridged nineteenth-century chromolithographic illustration and twentieth-century comic art.