Barney Google

Billy DeBeck's *Barney Google* follows its titular protagonist through a series of rapid-fire sight gags and domestic misadventures. This Sunday page demonstrates the visual vocabulary that defined early newspaper comics: sequential panel layouts, speech balloons carrying dialogue and thought, and a recurring cast of characters in escalating comic predicaments. DeBeck's energetic line work and slapstick pacing exemplify the format that transformed the Sunday newspaper supplement into a mass medium. By the 1920s, such strips had become essential to circulation wars, their visual language—borrowed from vaudeville and animated film—establishing conventions that would define comic books.