Sketches of Heads of Men

This page of character studies by American artist Arnold William Brunner demonstrates the foundational technique of newspaper comic strip development in the 1890s. The sketches show five distinct male heads rendered in ink, each with different hat styles and facial expressions—a visual vocabulary essential to early comics. By isolating character types and features, artists like Brunner established the repeatable, recognizable figures that would populate the Sunday newspaper pages emerging in this decade. The varied expressions and profile angles reveal how artists studied faces to create consistent characters across multiple panels, a prerequisite for the serialized humor strips that would soon revolutionize newspaper illustration and eventually give birth to the modern comic book format.