Les Amours de Monsieur Vieux Bois — Title Page

What appears here is not a narrative panel but Töpffer's decorative title lettering — LES AMOURS DE MR VIEUX BOIS rendered in dense, cross-hatched display type, each letter carved out of black hatching in a woodcut-like hand. A manuscript annotation in the upper right reads a Butler / 1893, recording a later owner's mark. The lettering itself is the threshold: cross it and you enter 98 sequential vignettes that track a lovelorn man's obsessive pursuit of his idéale. Töpffer's Geneva-published picture-stories of the 1830s established the grammar of sequential art — recurring characters, panel-to-panel causality, speech integrated with image — a full half-century before the newspaper comic strip made those conventions mass culture.