Bud 'n' Bub: The Story of Umbrellas

Ed Kressy's Bud 'n' Bub exemplifies the Sunday comic strip format that shaped modern visual narrative. Two child characters anchor episodic humor across six panels, each advancing a loosely connected theme—here, the global history of umbrellas. Kressy employs the visual grammar now standard to comics: panel borders defining temporal sequence, speech balloons for dialogue, and recurring characters. The strip moves from domestic comedy to educational digression, typical of newspaper comics that entertained while informing. The casual anthropological references—Egyptian, Assyrian, Chinese, Burmese designs—reflect period illustration conventions. Kressy's linework and compositional clarity made Bud 'n' Bub legible in newsprint, the primary medium through which American audiences encountered sequential art before the comic book boom of the 1940s.