Crossing the River Styx

This engraving by Julius Caesar Thaeter depicts a classical mythological scene: Charon ferries souls across the River Styx while crowds gather on the banks. The composition uses sequential arrangement and spatial depth to narrate a narrative moment—techniques that would become foundational to comic strip design. Though rooted in classical subject matter rather than humor, the crowded arrangement of figures and clear visual storytelling prefigures the panel-based sequential art that would dominate newspapers by the 1890s. Early comic strips inherited these Renaissance and Baroque conventions of visual narrative, transforming them through recurring characters, speech balloons, and the grid-based panel structure that emerged with newspaper printing technology.