Billy the Boy Artist

This Sunday strip follows Billy, a young art student, through a mishap that becomes the week's running gag. Asked to sculpt a bust of his professor, Billy creates a caricature so unflattering that the professor sits for it anyway—then discovers the exaggerated result mid-sitting. The narrative unfolds across six panels with overlapping scenes, speech balloons advancing the plot, and comic timing built into the grid. The strip exemplifies early comic art conventions: recurring child protagonist, domestic and school settings, slapstick consequence, and the visual language—panel borders, caption boxes, gesture and expression—that newspapers developed in the 1900s to tell stories in sequence. These Sunday pages were the training ground for the visual grammar that would define comic books.