Les Amours de Monsieur Vieux Bois, Plate 78

A single horizontal vignette crowds the page from left to right: a mob of round-faced onlookers press against a low wall in the background while, in the foreground, a robed cleric brandishing a cross leads a roped woman carrying an infant toward a smoking pyre at right, a small dog trotting at her heels. Töpffer's line is loose and rapid—rubbery faces, billowing garments, figures leaning into motion—and the eye moves naturally along the procession toward the lit faggots. The French caption below names the Chapter as judge and condemner. Töpffer's Vieux Bois, circulated in manuscript from the late 1820s and published 1837, is among the earliest works to systematically use sequenced drawn panels with integrated captions to tell a continuous story, a structural invention that underlies every comic strip and graphic novel that followed.