Il faut que vous fassiez encore place à sept voyageurs…

Honoré Daumier's lithograph from his *Les Trains de Plaisir* series depicts a railway platform in comic crisis: an official gestures frantically at an already packed third-class carriage whose passengers — rendered with the bulging eyes, exaggerated noses, and slack mouths characteristic of Daumier's bourgeois grotesques — spill from every window. Class is the explicit target: the overcrowded excursion train was a new democratic misery, the cheap 'pleasure train' anything but pleasant. Daumier worked for *Le Charivari* in the tradition running from Rowlandson and Gillray through French caricature, using crayon lithography's tonal softness to amplify comic expression. These serialized print sequences — recurring characters, sequential gags, compressed narrative — fed directly into the panel-comic logic that would become the comic strip.