Billy Possum

Billy Possum, drawn by Paul West, appeared in newspapers as a Sunday comic strip featuring slapstick humor and animal characters. The strip employs the visual conventions that defined early newspaper comics: multiple panels arranged in sequence, speech balloons, exaggerated facial expressions, and dynamic action poses. West's cartoon style—with bold ink lines and energetic compositions—was typical of the Sunday pages that served as the proving ground for sequential art. These newspaper strips, running daily and weekly from the 1890s onward, established the fundamental grammar of comics: panel borders, word-picture integration, and recurring characters that drove reader loyalty and advertising revenue. Strips like Billy Possum helped establish comics as a mass medium before comic books as we know them existed.