Der kleine Pepi mit der neuen Hose

Three hand-colored vignettes read left to right across a single broadsheet plate. In the first, a tall adult steadies a crouching boy while measuring him for trousers; a second child watches. The middle panel erupts into motion: the boy leaps from a rock over a pond, hat flying, frog escaping. The third shows a fisherman hauling the drenched child from the water in a net. Bold outlines, flat color washes, and exaggerated gesture keep the eye moving cleanly across the sequence. The German captions below each panel carry the narrative, panel by panel — exactly the grammar that picture-story sheets like the Münchener Bilderbogen were teaching European readers decades before the newspaper comic strip codified it into mass culture.