Frederick Opper, Alphonse and Gaston (1901)

 

Alphonse and Gaston by Frederick Burr Opper (1901).

One of the original innovators of the newspaper comic strip in the United States introduced his famous overly-polite duo Alphonse and Gaston in 1901 in the Sunday comic pages of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. The great humour of the strip stemmed from the oblivious, paralyzing nature of the characters' deferring and bowing to each other in contrast to their increasingly chaotic surroundings and dangerous situations. Opper brought his trademark anarchic spirit and talent for grotesquerie to the strip, continuing to innovate formally through the increased use of word balloons to carry the weight of story as well as dialogue, which in this strip really was more than half the joke. The characters' names remain bywords for dandified courtesy even today, a century after their last adventures.

The critics: "Alphonse and Gaston (and eventually their friend Leon) became the stereotypical Frenchmen --and it was a stereotype that Opper in this strip helped define. In idiotic extensions of formal courtesy, such dialogue as "After you, my dear Alphonse!" "No, no — I insist; after you, dear Gaston!" might precede the terrible onrush of a freight train from whose tracks the pair were inviting each other to depart. Numbing disaster scarcely shook the Frenchmen from their rule-book etiquette, but occasionally there would be the lament to return to the happy days of --not Paris-- but East Paterson, New Jersey, or some such geographical non sequitur. --Richard Marschall, America's Great Comic-strip Artists: From the Yellow Kid to Peanuts, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1997.