Two Mexicans Standing

This sketch by Howard Russell Butler presents two standing figures wearing wide-brimmed sombreros and period clothing, rendered in ink with confident line work and selective cross-hatching. The composition uses minimal detail to establish character types through costume and posture—a common approach in late 19th-century illustration. While predating the newspaper comic strip's formal emergence in the 1890s, such figure studies exemplify the drawing conventions that would soon populate the Sunday pages and dailies, where recurring characters and standardized visual shorthand became fundamental to sequential narrative. The economy of line and reliance on recognizable costume elements anticipate the visual grammar that artists like Richard Outcault and Winsor McCay would systematize into the new medium of the comic strip.