From the exhibition
The Darktown Fire Brigade: All on Their Mettle
Koehler, Joseph · 1889
This color lithograph from Currier & Ives' "Darktown Comics" series depicts African Americans engaged in chaotic firefighting. The print employs the visual vocabulary emerging in 1880s popular entertainment: sequential action across a single composition, multiple figures in physical comedy, and dense narrative detail. Published as affordable mass-market decoration, such prints shaped visual comedy conventions that would migrate into early newspaper comic strips.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com CC0