Bud 'n' Bub by Ed Kressy

Ed Kressy's *Bud 'n' Bub* appeared in Sunday newspaper comics, featuring two young characters navigating absurdist scenarios. This strip exemplifies the visual vocabulary that newspaper comics pioneered: numbered panels guiding sequential narrative, speech balloons carrying dialogue and exposition, and recurring characters sustaining reader interest across episodes. The strip employs dense crosshatching and dynamic figure work typical of the era's comic art. Rather than joke-based gags, Kressy builds humor through situation and character interaction, with panels flowing left-to-right in the conventions that would anchor comic-book layout. Newspaper Sunday pages and dailies served as the primary training ground and testing ground for the visual grammar—panel transitions, pacing, composition—that became foundational to the comic book medium emerging in the 1930s and 1940s.