Alphonse and Gaston Consult a Fortune Teller

This Sunday comic strip follows two French gentlemen whose elaborate mutual politeness drives a slapstick narrative. Alphonse and Gaston, created during the newspaper comics boom, exemplify early sequential storytelling: six panels advance the gag through escalating chaos as the fortune teller's reading triggers increasingly absurd collisions and mishaps. The strip's visual vocabulary—speech balloons, panel borders, recurring characters, sight gags dependent on sequential flow—became foundational to American comic art. The Sunday pages of this era established the medium's grammar, moving beyond single-panel cartoons to narrative sequences that required readers to track action and dialogue across panels, directly anticipating the comic book form.