Accounting for Transformative Moments in the History of the Political Cartoon

Abstract

In the ongoing project to construct a global history of the political cartoon (Scully, 2014), one is struck by the need to account for that most basic of historical phenomena: change over time. The cartoon of today is very different from that of a century ago, and even more removed from the artistic forms that existed in previous centuries. So great are these differences, in fact, that although some scholars are happy to treat the Reformation-era woodblock pamphlets, the copper-engraved stand-alone caricatures, the "big cuts" that appeared in weekly periodicals like Punch, and the newspaper-based cartoons of the 20th Century, as part of a continuum (e.g., Coupe, 1986-1993; Dewey, 2007), others are more inclined to treat (e.g.) 18th-Century, stand-alone "caricatures" as being distinct and different from "cartoons." Much ink has been spilt over the shifts in terminology and meaning of descriptors, and the apparent need to refer strictly to "caricature" or "political satire" prior to the application of the word "cartoon" in 1843 (Kunzle, 1973: 2; Paulson, 2007: 312; Bryant, 2009: 7-8; McPhee and Orenstein, 2011: 3-5; Baer, 2012: 217-218). Yet it is encouraging that the great E. H. Gombrich (1963) could refer generally to "cartoons" when discussing a variety of historical forms of the same phenomenon, and W. A. Coupe could happily observe the need for the niceties of classification ( 1993: xxxiii), but also refer to "cartoons" and "cartoonists" inhabiting the 16th Century (1993: xxxix; 1962: 65-86).