Alphonse and Gaston Invite Leon to a Rowing

This Sunday strip follows two rotund French dandies and their guest Leon in a small rowboat, where politeness creates chaos. The artist uses sequential panels with speech balloons to propel narrative through dialogue and physical comedy—Leon caught between Alphonse and Gaston's mutual deference as they attempt to row. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comics' reliance on recurring characters and situational humor, where visual gags unfold across a grid. By 1902, the Sunday page had become a laboratory for visual storytelling: multiple tiers, varied panel sizes, and integrated text establishing conventions that shaped the medium's grammar for decades.