Rawhide Bill & His First Visit to the Effete East

This Sunday comic strip by Heppner Blackman follows Rawhide Bill through four sequential panels narrating a frontier misadventure. Bill shoots a tinhorn gambler named Roulette Czar, gets arrested at a bar, is tied and dragged across open country, and faces trial before a jury that includes a Chinese worker. The strip employs the visual conventions now standard to comics: rectangular panels arranged in grid formation, speech balloons containing narrative captions, and exaggerated character expressions and body language to convey action and humor. Recurring characters and episodic storytelling like this strip were hallmarks of the newspaper Sunday pages that preceded and directly influenced the emergence of comic books in the 1930s.