Billy Bounce Makes a Clean Sweep of Doubting Thomas

This Sunday strip follows Billy Bounce, a mischievous child character, as he sets out to prove Thomas wrong through increasingly chaotic physical comedy. Across six panels, Billy bounces through a house, launching into a staircase and creating destruction—each panel advancing the gag through sequential action and speech balloons that carry the narrative. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comics' reliance on recurring characters, slapstick humor, and panel-to-panel storytelling. Billy Bounce strips appeared in major Sunday editions during the early 1900s, helping establish the visual conventions—bordered panels, expressive typography, and character-driven humor—that would define the emerging medium of comic strips and eventually the comic book industry itself.