Alphonse and Gaston

This comic strip follows two courteous French characters whose elaborate politeness creates physical comedy. Across six panels, Alphonse and Gaston navigate a canoe encounter with a woman, each deferring to the other with exaggerated formality—"Pardon me," "After you, my dear Alphonse." The strip employs sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and visual gags dependent on reading left to right. Published in Sunday newspapers, such strips were foundational to comics' visual language, demonstrating how panel arrangement and dialogue balloons could convey narrative and humor. The format—combining illustration, typography, and sequential action—became the grammar of the medium and directly influenced the comic books that emerged decades later.