Émile Courtet's job as one of several assistants to Gill was to complete the backgrounds; he may have done a few of the illustrations by himself. During this process, he developed a style of caricature based on Gill's. Gill's trademark was the large, recognizable head of the target (with a fairly benign expression) atop a small puppet body (doing something ridiculous). Clearly, it was based on "Fantoche" puppetry. Émile took this style and added touches to suggest movement and imagery from the rest of "Guignol" puppetry. At about this time, he adopted the pseudonym of "Émile Cohl". The meaning of "Cohl" is obscure: it may be from the pigment known as "kohl", or perhaps it means that Émile stuck to his mentor Gill like glue (""colle"" in French). Perhaps it was chosen because it sounded exotic. The visual signature of a paste-pot appears in a few of Cohl's caricatures.