Barney Google

Billy DeBeck's *Barney Google* follows a scheming urban character through slapstick misadventures across a single Sunday page. The strip employs panel layout, dialogue balloons, and sequential narrative—formal devices that newspapers were standardizing in the 1920s. Google's perpetual chases, collisions, and get-rich-quick schemes unfold in seven frames, building comedic momentum through visual gags and exaggerated action. The character, rendered in DeBeck's distinctive hatched linework, became one of the decade's most syndicated strips, establishing the suburban everyman as a template for American comic humor.