The Fresh Easter Egg

W.W. Denslow's *Billy Bounce* strip demonstrates early comic strip conventions: sequential panels with speech balloons, a mischievous protagonist, and visual gags built on character interaction. Here, Humpty Dumpty's bullying provokes escalating chaos involving recognizable figures—the Mad March Hare, a Cigar Indian, Mother Goose—creating humor through collision and disruption. The panel structure guides readers left-to-right through cause and effect. Published in newspaper Sunday sections, such strips pioneered the visual grammar that would define comic books: recurring characters, narrative pacing through image sequence, and the marriage of text to sequential drawing that became the medium's foundation.