The National Game: Three 'Outs' and One 'Run'—Abraham Winning the Ball

This political cartoon by Currier & Ives uses baseball as satire during the 1860 presidential election. Four figures represent political figures engaged in a game, with speech balloons explaining strategy and outcomes. The work demonstrates how newspapers and print media employed sequential narrative and dialogue to comment on current events. Though not a comic strip in the modern sense, it employs visual conventions—multiple figures in sequence, speech balloons, and sequential action—that would become fundamental to newspaper comics. The caricatured ethnic features reflect period artistic conventions. Baseball imagery served nineteenth-century illustrators as accessible visual metaphor for political competition and national identity.