Billy Possum: His Life and Adventures

Paul West's Billy Possum exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic strip at its origins. The strip employs the visual conventions that defined early comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, and a consistent cast of animal characters in domestic and fantastical scenarios. Billy, a mischievous possum, anchors recurring gags built around slapstick mishaps and child-centered humor. The dense layouts pack multiple narrative threads across each page, mixing verse with dialogue. This format—serialized humor in the Sunday papers—became the direct precursor to the comic book. Strips like this one trained readers in the grammar of sequential art and established the newspaper Sunday page as the primary medium for visual storytelling before the emergence of the pulp and periodical comic book industry.