Not a Bad Idea for Warm Weather

John Leech's hand-colored proof depicts three women in a rowboat, one holding a green umbrella against the sun. The composition uses sequential positioning to show a leisurely scene, with the inscribed caption offering wry commentary on their outing. Leech was a pioneering Victorian illustrator whose work in periodicals helped establish visual storytelling conventions—spatial composition, expressive figures, and text-image relationships—that would become foundational to newspaper comics. His prolific contributions to *Punch* magazine and illustrated novels demonstrated how sequential arrangement and captioned imagery could convey narrative and humor beyond single-panel illustration, influencing the formal language comics would adopt decades later.