Billy Possum: His Life and Adventures

A Sunday newspaper comic strip by Paul West, with illustrations by Horace Taylor. Billy Possum follows the titular character through a sequence of episodic adventures rendered in separate panels with narrative text and dialogue balloons. The strip demonstrates the conventions that shaped early comic art: recurring protagonist, sequential panel layout, integration of words and images, and character-driven humor across multiple tiers. These newspaper Sunday pages and their daily strip counterparts were the direct precursor to the comic book format, establishing the visual language—panel borders, speech balloons, expressive cartooning—that defined the medium as it emerged.