Rodolphe Töpffer, *Les Amours de Monsieur Vieux Bois* (1837), Plate 56

Three ruled vignettes read left to right, the eye pulled by posture and caption across each panel break. In the first, Vieux Bois lies sprawled across a large woman's lap in a domestic interior, a stool and framed picture anchoring the room. The center panel shifts scene: a woman seated at a table scrutinizes a small suspended figure while drapery fills the background. The right panel shows the hapless hero bundled between two armed soldiers with bayonets, a crowd pressing behind. Töpffer's line is quick and elastic — figures slightly rubbery, faces exaggerated but never frozen. These histoires en estampes, predating the newspaper strip by decades, established the grammar of sequential image-text storytelling: the panel border, the caption beneath, the cliffhanger cut.