Beau Ogleby, Plate 90

This plate from The Comical Adventures of Beau Ogleby — a British adaptation of Rodolphe Töpffer's pioneering Swiss picture-stories — now appears blank, its ink faded or its image lost to time, leaving only aged, foxed paper with warm amber toning and vignetting at the edges. Töpffer's original format, developed in Geneva during the 1820s–40s, placed hand-drawn vignettes in horizontal sequence beneath handwritten captions, training the eye to read image and text together as one continuous narrative. That structure made him the founding figure of sequential comic art, predating the newspaper strip by half a century. Even an empty plate carries that history inside its margins.