Sketches for Faith

Francis Augustus Lathrop's preliminary drawings for *Faith*, a strip featuring winged cherubs in dynamic flight and interaction. The loose pen work and gestural quality typical of artist studies show Lathrop working out poses and compositional balance before final publication. The recurring cherub characters and their narrative arrangement across the horizontal field anticipate the sequential visual storytelling that would define newspaper comic strips. Lathrop's economical line work and use of the page as a unified space for character action reflect the emerging visual grammar developing in American periodicals during the 1890s, when Sunday supplements began establishing conventions for panel-based narrative that would shape the medium's foundation.