Almanach Comique: 150 Vignettes par Cham, 25e Année

This chromolithographed cover advertisement for Cham's annual comic almanac presents a swirling street tableau: a flamboyantly costumed figure — part soldier, part buffoon, feathered hat askew — lunges toward an elegantly dressed woman, while subsidiary vignettes crowd the margins with social types: bourgeois couples, a bullfight scene, figures of ridicule drawn with the rubber-limbed exaggeration that was Cham's signature. The caricatures carry the class condescension typical of Second Empire humor: working people rendered as grotesque, fashionable women as vain, foreigners as exotic props. Cham (Amédée de Noé) worked squarely in the tradition running from Daumier's Charivari lithographs back through Rowlandson and Gillray — sequential, cheap, mass-printed satire aimed at a broad middling public. These almanacs, sold for 50 centimes, are a direct ancestor of the comic strip: panels, recurring social types, printed humor democratized by the lithographic press.