*Fast Asleep*

A stout, bald gentleman slumps in a chair, head thrown back, mouth agape, his powdered wig slipping from his neck like a dead animal. On the table beside him: a jug, a wine glass, and a newspaper—the respectable props of civic life rendered absurd. Gillray's hand-coloured etching uses hatched line to exaggerate every bulge of belly and jowl; the subject reads as prosperous, self-satisfied, and utterly useless. The class critique is mild by Gillray's standards, but the visual grammar—sequential physical excess, comic timing frozen in a single frame—is precisely the grammar that feeds into the comic strip. Rowlandson, Cruikshank, and eventually the newspaper strip artists all inherit this: the joke lives in the body, rendered in ink and acid.