Opening Page, *Histoire de la Sainte Russie*

Doré opens his mock history of Russia with a visual pun no one had quite dared before. Where the story should begin, he prints a solid black rectangle: the origins of Russia, the caption deadpans, are lost in the darkness of antiquity. Beside it a second panel is nearly blank, a few ghost lines, because the tale only starts to draw itself around the eleventh century. Below, a crisp wood engraving of polar bears nosing across the ice supplies the first thing worth picturing. Three panels, three degrees of visibility, arranged as an argument. Doré uses the page the way a comic strip does, timing information across boxes and letting emptiness do the work. That all-black panel would not look out of place in an avant-garde comic a full century later.