Picture-Stories Before Comics

If the satirical weekly gave comics their bite, this gallery holds their storytelling machinery. Grandville, the Nancy-born fantasist, spent his career granting life to the inanimate and human vice to animals, and in Un Autre Monde (1844) he built an entire dream-world of talking objects and costumed beasts, imagery a later cartoonist would find instantly familiar. Gustave Doré, better remembered now for his solemn book illustrations, was barely twenty-two when he made Histoire de la Sainte Russie, a mock history that runs hundreds of images across its pages, varies its panels for tempo, streaks its figures with motion lines, and even prints a solid black rectangle where the story has not yet begun. Later in the century Emmanuel Poiré, drawing as Caran d'Ache, stripped the caption away entirely and told jokes in pictures alone, his wordless sequences the direct ancestor of the silent strip. None of these artists called their work comics. All of them were teaching the page how to move.