Alphonse and Gaston

This Sunday strip follows two elaborately polite French characters through a chaotic election day. The six-panel narrative uses sequential art to build comic momentum: Alphonse and Gaston begin by courteously insisting the other vote first, escalate into physical comedy at a polling place, and conclude with police intervention as their conflict spirals into street disorder.

The strip exemplifies early newspaper comics' visual vocabulary—bordered panels, speech balloons, and repeated characters—that shaped the emerging medium. The artist employs slapstick and exaggerated expressions to convey action across panels, relying on readers' growing familiarity with the sequential form. Published in the Sunday funnies alongside the daily strips that anchored American newspapers, such work established the narrative and graphic conventions that would define comic books.