Aux Bains de Boulogne

Pen-and-ink drawing by the French caricaturist Cham (Amédée de Noé), likely prepared for reproduction as a wood engraving in a periodical such as Le Charivari. The scene shows a carriage half-submerged in the sea at the fashionable Boulogne bathing resort, its drunk coachman — rendered with the broad, contemptuous line typical of French comic journalism — steering helplessly into the waves while a passenger protests. The joke turns on class anxiety: a bourgeois bather at the mercy of a sottish working-class driver. Cham inherited the tradition of Daumier and Gavarni, whose lithographic social vignettes for Le Charivari directly fed the sequenced panel strips that would become the comic strip. Such single-image gag drawings, captioned below, are the immediate ancestors of the comic book page.