The Comical Adventures of Beau Ogleby — Plate 55

Three hand-coloured vignettes carry the eye left to right across a single page, each captioned in italic script beneath. In the first, the hunched Ogleby peers into a mirror-stand, hand raised to his face, bracing himself for tomorrow's engagements. The centre panel opens outward: his spirits lifted, he bows extravagantly toward a seated woman in a full green dress, hat feathers flying behind him. In the third, two men face off mid-argument, one finger raised accusingly — Ogleby, we're told, is now engaged for twelve o'clock. The linework is loose and exaggerated, noses enormous, postures almost boneless. These English editions of Töpffer's picture-stories — the first works to systematically pair sequential drawings with running captions — arrived just as the format was teaching readers, for the first time, to follow a drawn narrative across a page.