Dites donc, papa Drouillet, avec c'te envergure…

A hand-colored lithograph from Daumier's Les Baigneurs series, published by Aubert in Paris. Two bathers stand before numbered changing-cabin doors: a gaunt, white-capped figure at left faces a corpulent man at right, his striped bathing trunks straining, cigarette dangling from his lip. The caption has a child remark that with such a wingspan, papa Drouillet could swim like a dolphin — a joke at the fat bourgeois's expense. Daumier's lithographic line strips his targets down to comic essentials, exaggerating body type as class marker in the manner of Rowlandson and Gillray before him. Such French picture-press satire — cheap, mass-printed, serially numbered — fed directly into the panel-sequenced page structures that would become the comic strip.