Billy Bounce and his Saint Patrick's Day Parade

W.W. Denslow's comic strip follows Billy Bounce, a mischievous character made Grand Marshal of an Irish-American St. Patrick's Day parade. The strip uses sequential panels, speech balloons, and sight gags to tell its story: Billy selects helpers, a street brawl erupts between rival factions, and chaos ensues. Denslow employs exaggerated caricature and slapstick humor typical of early newspaper comics. Published in the Sunday pages, such strips were foundational to comic narrative—they established recurring characters, visual pacing through panel sequence, and the integration of text and image that would become the language of the medium.