Not all heroes fight crime. Some of them just bounce around.

Billy was just an average boy until, one day, his fairy God-father (the rather unfortunately named Mr. Gas) gave him a balloon suit which he could inflate like a balloon and... yeah, that's it. In his strips, he'd bounce around and interact with various characters like Santa Claus and Mother Goose.

Really this character is more notable for their illustrator - one W.W. Denslow, who you may know as illustrating the first Wizard of Oz book and none of the other ones due to him falling out with Baum while making the Wizard of Oz stage musical. He also at one point owned an island in Bermuda and crowned himself "King Denslow I, Monarch of Denslow Islands and Protector of Coral Reefs", which isn't too relevant to this, but I thought it was fun. If I had no self-control, I'd be going on about his later Scarecrow and Tin-Man series (made to rival Baum's "Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz" comic strip).

Billy Bounce would go on for 7 years with various stories published in newspapers as well as an original book published in 1906. Since he first appeared in 1901, Billy is one of the earliest characters we've covered here (with the earliest being the Human Bat).