Les Amours de Monsieur Vieux Bois, Plate 43

Four vertical vignettes read left to right like a film strip, each separated by a ruled border. In the first, a spindly, wild-haired figure — Monsieur Vieux Bois — gestures with one bony finger, warming to a speech. By the second panel he is already more animated, torso twisting, arms spreading. The third shows him fully airborne with rhetoric, both hands flung wide, hair electric. In the fourth he crashes or collapses, limbs splayed. Töpffer's line is loose and economical: a few scratchy strokes convey momentum, posture, and comic collapse. French captions beneath each panel carry the narrative. This is sequential art in its modern sense — panels, progression, word-and-image unity — produced decades before the newspaper comic strip existed. Töpffer's histoires en estampes are the direct ancestor of every comic page that followed.