Münchener Bilderbogen: A Hunting Dog's Quarrel

Three hand-colored vignettes read left to right across a single broadsheet, narrating a dispute between hunting dogs over shared prey. In the first panel, a lean brown hound drags down a hare while a second dog races in from the left. The middle vignette shows the dogs prostrate over a dark, limp animal body — the contested kill — caught in flat open landscape under a pale sky. The third panel finds one dog nosing aggressively toward the other against a rocky horizon. Gothic-script captions beneath each image advance the story beat by beat. The line work is economical and assured; color is applied in broad washes. These Bilderbogen broadsheets — cheap, widely circulated, sequentially paneled — form the direct technical ancestor of the newspaper strip, establishing the grammar of guttered images and captioned action that would define comics for the next century.