Almanach Comique — Promotional Broadside

A lithographed advertising broadside for the Almanach Comique, a Parisian illustrated almanac priced at 50 centimes and claiming 150 vignettes. The artist Cham (Amédée de Noé) crowds the sheet with stock comic types: a turbaned figure stirring a cauldron at center, grotesque politicians, a bear, a running dog-and-rider cluster, and a nurse attending figures at right — the chaotic visual energy itself advertising the humor within. The caricature of the turbaned, hook-nosed central figure reflects the casual Orientalist and ethnic shorthand French popular illustration deployed without friction. Lithography — fast, cheap, reproducible — made such almanacs possible, placing Cham squarely in the Daumier-era tradition of Charivari satirists whose dense multi-panel vignette pages fed directly into the emerging grammar of the comic strip.