Exploitation de l'amitié (Exploiting Friendship)

A lithograph from Daumier's Caricaturana series published in Le Charivari, showing a cluster of supplicants crowding a prosperous man who reclines in his chair with the smug ease of someone who knows his value. The standing figures are rendered with the rubbery, exaggerated physiognomy Daumier perfected — jowls pulled, postures oily — class anxiety made flesh. The joke is on social climbers milking a connection. Daumier sits squarely in the line running from Hogarth's moral-sequence prints through Gillray's political venom and Rowlandson's crowd grotesques: a tradition of sequential, captioned, mass-printed satire sold cheaply to urban audiences. That lineage — image plus text, recurring characters, serial publication — is the direct ancestor of the comic strip and, eventually, the comic book.