C-Bass

This 19th-century chromolithograph combines caricature and natural history in a single image—a form of visual humor popular in periodicals before the modern comic strip emerged. A grotesquely exaggerated male face merges with an enormous fish amid aquatic vegetation. The juxtaposition creates absurdist comedy through scale and incongruity. Published during the lithographic era when hand-colored prints circulated through newspapers and journals, this work precedes the sequential panel narratives that would define comics. Yet it demonstrates the period's experimental approach to mixing text and image, and its deployment of recurring visual types—the crude physiognomy, the naturalistic specimen—that would influence later comic conventions.