The first thing to catch the eye in this riotous page from Billy Bounce is the sense of comic peril: a boy in a sailor's cap clings to a plank, eyes wide, as a squat, golden automaton stands obliviously atop the same scrap of wood. Around them, a nervous dog, a bristling sea urchin with a beak, and a bearded sea serpent in a helmet crowd the scene, while a great red tentacle coils beneath the water, threatening to upend the whole adventure. The palette is bold and flat, each character outlined in thick black, their exaggerated expressions and improbable company announcing this as a world where logic takes a holiday and the impossible is everyday.

The waterline slices the image in two, heightening the tension and humor—above, the raft is crowded and absurd; below, the boy's predicament is made even more precarious by the looming sea creature. This illustration comes from the 1906 comic fantasy Billy Bounce, a product of the early twentieth-century boom in American illustrated children's books and comic strips. William Wallace Denslow, best known for his work on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, brought the same graphic wit and sense of play to this series, which delighted in surreal adventures and oddball companions. Such books were often published in large, colorful editions, meant to catch the eye of young readers in shop windows and on parlor tables, their stories shaped as much by the illustrator's hand as the author's pen.

The copy from which this image is scanned was published by M. A. Donohue & Co.

of Chicago, and though the world has kept few records of its journey, the exuberant strangeness of Denslow's vision still leaps from the page—inviting us to linger, and perhaps to wonder what waits just out of frame.