Barney Google — The Washington Times, May 16, 1920

Billy DeBeck's *Barney Google* runs twelve panels here in a tight con-man farce: the bug-eyed, top-hatted Barney sweet-talks a mark named Mike into signing a lease, conducts 'business' from a rooftop because the real offices belong to someone else, then tumbles off the ledge — insisting, stars circling his head, 'I was pushed.' DeBeck's linework is loose and rubbery, his speech balloons crammed with working-class argot, his staging pure vaudeville. Founded in 1919, *Barney Google* would soon introduce Spark Plug the racehorse and become one of America's most-quoted strips. Sunday pages like this one — full-color broadsheets folded into sections — were the direct commercial and visual ancestor of the comic book format that emerged in the 1930s, repurposing exactly this syndicated art into newsstand pamphlets.