Alphonse and Gaston

This Sunday newspaper strip follows two French characters whose excessive politeness becomes their undoing at the racetrack. Across six panels, Alphonse and Gaston's competing courtesies—each insisting the other ride first, drink first, enter first—create physical chaos and comic mayhem. The strip exemplifies early comics' visual storytelling: sequential panels with speech balloons, exaggerated motion lines, and escalating gags that unfold through image and text together. Published in the newspaper Sunday funnies, such strips pioneered the visual grammar that would define comic books: the panel grid, recurring characters, and the merger of drawing with dialogue to advance a joke across multiple frames.