Billy Make Believe

H.C. Herriman's *Billy Make Believe* appeared in Sunday newspaper comics, featuring a boy's imaginative adventures among fantastical creatures and dream-logic scenarios. The strip exemplifies the Sunday page format—a full-page comic with large panels, decorative borders, and a how-to-make-it craft feature footer, common practice for the era. Herriman employs the established visual grammar of sequential art: speech balloons, panel-to-panel action, and expressive ink work. The narrative shifts between Billy's waking world and his flights of fancy, a device that allowed newspaper comics to explore surreal humor and wildly inventive settings. Such strips, distributed nationally through syndication, established the visual and narrative foundations that would define the emerging comic book medium.