Almanach Comique: 150 Vignettes par Cham, 25e Année

This chromolithographed cover advertisement for Cham's annual comic almanac presents a swirling street tableau: a flamboyantly costumed figure — part soldier, part buffoon, feathered hat askew — lunges toward an elegantly dressed woman, while subsidiary vignettes crowd the margins with social types: bourgeois couples, a bullfight scene, figures of ridicule drawn with the rubber-limbed exaggeration that was Cham's signature. The caricatures carry the class condescension typical of Second Empire humor: working people rendered as grotesque, fashionable women as vain, foreigners as exotic props. Cham (Amédée de Noé) worked squarely in the tradition running from Daumier's *Charivari* lithographs back through Rowlandson and Gillray — sequential, cheap, mass-printed satire aimed at a broad middling public. These almanacs, sold for 50 centimes, are a direct ancestor of the comic strip: panels, recurring social types, printed humor democratized by the lithographic press.