Rawhide Bill & He Takes the Palm as a Gay Gallant

By Heppner Blackman, this Sunday comic employs the visual vocabulary that defined early newspaper comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, and a recurring cast engaged in slapstick comedy. The strip follows Rawhide Bill and supporting characters through a card-game sequence where boasts about "pretty hands" lead to physical comedy and escalating chaos across four panels. The exaggerated line work and dynamic postures are characteristic of the Sunday supplement style that emerged in the 1890s, when newspapers began serializing comic narratives. These strips—appearing in dailies and Sunday editions—functioned as the direct precursor to comic books, establishing the panel-based narrative structure and character-driven humor that would define the medium for decades.