The Darktown Fire Brigade—Saved!

This Currier & Ives lithograph depicts a chaotic fire-rescue scene rendered in the visual language of sequential narrative—multiple figures in action across a single composition, the scene divided spatially to show cause and effect. The print belongs to the publisher's "Darktown Comics" series, a popular mass-market image that pioneered the graphic storytelling conventions—exaggerated gesture, dynamic composition, sequential action—that would define the newspaper comics born in the 1890s. These images circulated widely in American homes, establishing visual precedent for how comics would move bodies through space and time on the page.