À Naples… le meilleur des rois

Honoré Daumier's lithograph shows a uniformed monarch — almost certainly Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, nicknamed 'King Bomba' after his 1848 bombardment of Messina — surveying from a palace balcony a ruined city strewn with corpses. The composition is deliberately theatrical: the king's epauletted back dominates the left foreground while the devastated street recedes in brutal perspective behind him. Daumier worked in the French tradition of political lithography descending from Gillray's grotesques and Rowlandson's crowd scenes, sharpened by Charivari's mass-circulation format. His caricature of royal indifference to civilian carnage belongs to the same satirical lineage — image-as-argument, sequential implication — that would migrate directly into newspaper comic strips and eventually the comic book panel.