Bud 'n' Bub: March of Time

Ed Kressy's Bud 'n' Bub exemplifies the newspaper comic strip format that established visual conventions still in use today. Two young boys learn history from an elder who demonstrates ancient timekeeping methods—Egyptian obelisks, sand glasses, sundials, water clocks, and early mechanical devices. The strip uses sequential panels with speech balloons to organize information and advance narrative, a grammar inherited from 19th-century sequential art and refined in comics' early decades. Educational strips like this one popularized the medium beyond pure humor, reaching Sunday papers and dailies nationwide as entertainment that parents and children consumed together.