| Summary: | Today forgotten, the extent of Cham’s influence on visual culture could surprise specialists in the comic strip, film, and semiotics. Throughout the 1840s and 50s, he endowed the narrative image with unprecedented reflexivity, polyphony, and variations in framing and points of view. Although he never made any influence explicit, the self-deconstructive humor of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman(1759-67) resonates through Cham’s image-based storytelling. Interested in mapping out the migration of narrative strategies between art forms, this first half of an article in two parts examines the manifest influence of Tristram Shandy on Cham’s early career. His perspective games gave Sternesque tricks a few new twists and broke free from such immemorial rules of representation and narrative economy as respect of proscenium-view standards, redundancy between text and image, and even duty to depict a subject altogether.
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