From the exhibition
Beau Ogleby, Plate 108
after Rodolphe Töpffer (Tilt & Bogue) · c. 1845, after Rodolphe Töpffer (published by Tilt & Bogue)

This plate from *The Comical Adventures of Beau Ogleby* presents a blank or near-blank leaf — one of the transitional pages that punctuate Töpffer-derived picture-stories, giving the reader a beat of silence between episodes of physical comedy and social mishap. Töpffer's method, developed in Geneva from the 1820s onward, arranged small pen-drawn vignettes in horizontal rows, letting gesture and expression carry narrative across the sequence without relying on dense text. Tilt & Bogue brought these picture-stories to English readers, spreading the format that would directly seed the Victorian comic paper and, eventually, the twentieth-century comic book. Even a pause in the sequence is part of the grammar Töpffer invented.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain