Alphonse, Gaston and Their Friend Leon in Darkest Africa

A Sunday newspaper comic strip featuring two gentlemen and a friend encountering African wildlife. The strip employs the visual conventions that defined early comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters in escalating comedic situations. Alphonse and Gaston were popular newspaper features of the early 1900s, part of the Sunday supplement boom that established comics as a distinct medium. The strip's six-panel layout and slapstick narrative—warnings about elephants that quickly devolve into chaos—demonstrate how newspaper comics developed narrative momentum through visual pacing and character interaction, creating the grammar later adopted by comic books.