Almanach Comique, 25e Année — 150 Vignettes par Cham

A lithographed advertising sheet for the 1866 *Almanach Comique*, priced at 50 centimes and illustrated by Cham (Amédée de Noé). The central image shows a jester in tricolor costume kneeling before an elegantly dressed woman; surrounding vignettes — a celebrity horse mobbed for tail-hairs, a despairing allegorical figure, the moon watching the sun race past — announce the almanac's 150 comic scenes. Cham trained under Charlet and absorbed Daumier's lithographic fluency at *Le Charivari*, placing him squarely in the line running from Hogarth's engraved moral sequences through Gillray and Rowlandson to the French *image d'Épinal* broadsheets and German *Bilderbogen*. That tradition of sequential, captioned vignettes on a single sheet is the direct structural ancestor of the newspaper comic strip and the modern comic book.