Alphonse and Gaston

A six-panel Sunday strip featuring two rotund, elaborately dressed gentlemen locked in an escalating cycle of exaggerated politeness. Each panel advances the gag through sequential action: the characters bow, defer, insist the other proceed first, until chaos erupts. The strip employs the visual grammar pioneered in 1890s newspaper comics—distinct panels with speech balloons, expressive caricature, and sight gags building toward physical comedy. The recurring characters, their formal attire and accented speech, created a popular formula that ran for years across American newspapers. This strip exemplifies how Sunday pages became laboratories for visual narrative, developing panel transitions, character consistency, and comedic timing that would define the emerging medium.