Cartoons are a clever art form, not only in the content but in the drawing. Let's give the topic a Res Hist once over from the history of it to some that we enjoy. I do not  do illustration here so its up to the rest of you and I will sit back and enjoy.... or not.

Hogarth's Gin Lane, showing the evils of the Gin Craze prevalent at the time. Hogarth's drawing was made to lice in support of the Gin Act of 1751, which restricted the sale of gin to licensed vendors:

The contrasting Beer Street, where everyone is happy:

James Gillray's illustration of William Pitt and Napoleon carving the world into spheres of influence:

Thrown to the swine. Dutch artist Louis Raemaeker's view of the execution of nurse Edith Cavell:

David Low's cartoons from the Evening Standard in 1936 struck a nerve in the UK at the time. During the 1950s it emerged that one cartoon in particular had resulted in him becoming a "person of interest" to Secret Intelligence due to its blatant criticism of the then government's policy of appeasement towards Hitler. It's original caption was "How much will you give me not to kick your pants for, say, twenty-five years?"



If Low suspected he was treading dangerous water it never deterred him, his weekly cartoons rarely deviating from a strong anti-Nazi and anti-appeasement stance that sales figures suggested the paper's readership largely endorsed. His editors on more than one occasion even had to fend off threats of legal action from the German Ambassadors von Ribbentrop and Dirksen, the latter high-tailing it back to Berlin in 1939 with what was probably Low's most famous cartoon gazing back at him from every newspaper vendor's billboard en route to the airport.



.

The price of petrol has been increased by one penny- - Official

This cartoon by Philip Zec appeared in the Daily Mirror on the 6th March 1942.



wiki:

Morrison called Zec's piece a "wicked cartoon... worthy of Goebbels at his best" and telling the Mirror's editor, Cecil Thomas, that "only a very unpatriotic editor could pass it for publication". Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour, argued that Zec's work lowered the morale of the armed forces and the general public.

Churchill called on MI5 to investigate Zec's background, which revealed nothing more sinister than the fact he had left-wing sympathies and found no evidence of him being involved in subversion. At the same time the Mirror's register of shareholders was investigated to consider whether the paper should be shut down. The matter was debated in the House of Commons and, after MPs urged caution, the government settled on a severe reprimand.

I never understood why that cartoon was so scandalous as I've always thought it was intended to encourage efforts to save fuel and to illustrate that wasting it had serious consequences. But apparently Winston Churchill and Herbert Morrison thought the cartoon was suggesting that the petrol companies were deliberately profiting at the expense of British seamen's lives - which perhaps says more about them and their suspicions of senior British busnessmen, than about Zac's loyalties.

The cartoon was resurrected during the Falklands War, by the Guardian cartoonist Les Gibbard, with the caption,
"The price of sovereignty has increased—official":



This was published on 6 May 1982 following the sinking of the General Belgrano on 2 May, HMS Sheffield on 4 May, and along them a potential Peruvian peace plan. Thatcher was annoyed but the most vocal ire seems to have come from the Sun tabloid newspaper, which at the time was ranting about "traitors in our midst" and in particular the BBC and other media outlets who did not wholeheartedly follow the Sun's triumphalist tone with its "Gotcha!" headline:
"What is it but treason for the Guardian to print a cartoon showing a British seaman clinging to a raft... isn't that exactly calculated to weaken Britain's resolve at a time when lives have been lost, whatever the justice of her cause?

"Iconic", like "legendary", is a word so over-employed these days that the original statement it was designed to convey has been all but expunged from our palette of expression. When absolutely anything that, in any way we arbitrarily choose, is held up as a symbol of cultural distinction and then referred to by absolutely anyone as "iconic", true cultural icons are lost in the resulting sea of mediocrity.

However some cartoons, and indeed the cartoonists behind them, can arguably lay claim to the adjective. Cartoons, as graphic illustrations designed with accessibility in mind and which therefore, should they become popular, can become culturally ubiquitous in the process, have a knack of presenting candidates for true iconic status, especially as motifs for a zeitgeist. A really successful example, even when that zeitgeist has long passed, continues in the role as exemplar of that time in retrospect, be it as a rallying point for those wishing to indulge in nostalgia for the time it represented (and all that this time meant personally for those so indulging), or even simply as a totemic symbol for that time which even those too young to ever have experienced it will regard as a trustworthy prism through which to understand it - an extremely shorthand historical treatise which purports to convey fundamental and trustworthy truths about the culture that produced it.

It might be just me, but from the many such cartoon icons I could have chosen to illustrate this, my mind instinctively elected this one. First seen in 1971 (though its creator, Robert Crumb, and his highly distinctive graphic style had already been established as "illustrator supreme of the counter-culture" for quite a few years prior) this particular illustration would emerge from the throwaway comic where its artist had first published it and become, in poster form, an essential part of the visual backdrop for many people of a certain age for quite a few years afterwards. Like Jim Fitzpatrick's Guevara poster from that same cultural paradigm now long elapsed, this humble image continues to convey far more than its graphic components initially suggest.



.

Crumb had Trump sussed out a long time ago - in 1989:




There is a superb documentary about Crumb which deserves a place of its own on the "What Is Art?" thread - or here maybe. Thread confusion. I'll see if I can find a link that works.

Crumb deserves his own thread, and not just for his aesthetics - as a social commentator alone his long career has a historical value worthy of examination.

However, cartoons can tell historical stories in some very subtle ways indeed.

Operating in the period immediately prior to and then during Nazi-controlled Germany was a cartoonist called Erich Ohser who, through his biographical details alone, represents almost every aspect of cultural corruption that followed the rise of National Socialism to power. Ohser grew up in the mundane industrial "new" town of Plauen in Saxony, which from his earliest age seemed to foment within him an extreme antipathy towards all that was bad about this modern manifestation of German society and which he grew to feel his hometown represented in a depressing nutshell - narrow minded and petty bourgeois aspirations, nouveau-riche shallowness and, probably most importantly, a new, eager and worrying willingness to abandon tried and trusted traditional "Teutonic" values in pursuit of untried ideologies dishonestly masquerading as continuations of the "old" ways (Ohser to his dying day identified himself first and foremost as a "true" German patriot in the traditional sense). Like many others who shared this unease with what was developing around them Ohser's own burgeoning career as a comic illustrator inevitably brought him to Berlin, then a cultural focal point of artistic opposition to all that was most crass in the emerging ideologies, and while there inevitably focused his own attention on the principal players within these emergent political forces using what he regarded as bastardizations of ideology for their own advancement, and for whom Berlin also of course represented a vital centre of operations as their political power increased.

As "E O Plauen" (Erich Ohser aus Plauen) a typical cartoon of his from 1932, and one that became extremely popular with the public, was this image published in the Vorwärts Zeitung (Forward Newspaper), then a venerable organ with strong and unashamedly vocal SDP affiliations dating back to German unification and which would soon be outlawed by the Nazis (for obvious reasons).


"Urgently In Need Of Rest" with sub-caption "I feel bad before myself" (German humour may not translate as readily or as precisely as German words, I fear).

Less than a year after this picture had earned Ohser some local notoriety in Berlin its subject rose to absolute power, and this led to the artist, along with many others, now being in something of a dilemma, not just practically in terms of their career as satirists but also in terms of their own conscience. Some of his fellow satirists upped and fled the country, others simply abruptly abandoned their career entirely, some few persisted as before but paid a swift and severe penalty in Dachau and other new "rehabilitation" centres for "deviants", many swallowed their principles (or revealed their true colours) and promptly switched the focus of their satirical attack to those targets endorsed by the new order as remaining worthy of public ridicule (Bolsheviks, Jews, homosexuals, etc), while many - including Ohser - simply switched to "bland".

If the initial intention was to "bore" the public into realising the value of that which they had lost then the plan certainly backfired. Ohser, only recently the uncompromising and witty scourge of political hypocrites and megalomaniacs in intricate and accurate caricatures of a style unmistakably his own, quite understandably reinvented this style in every sense and found, to no small initial amusement and disbelief on his own part it must be said, even bigger success as the author of a syndicated strip series, enjoyed by millions, called "Father and Son". This was a cartoon drawn with a naive and simple economy that Ohser used exclusively in his work from that point on, in which the eponymous characters engaged in mildly diverting visual gags where the point was either that the father's vague sense of propriety was undermined by his son's even vaguer sense of precocity or that the two of them playfully highlighted society's foibles (without even an indirect reference to politics, of course).



It is hard to overstate just how popular these cartoons were at the time - even during the war enjoying sales in book form and newspaper syndication in countries under Nazi occupation or at war with that regime. Meanwhile Ohser in 1940 found himself employed by Goebbel's "Das Reich" newspaper (or at least that was how it termed itself) and in 1942 even staged a one-man exhibition in Berlin paid for by Goebbels' propaganda ministry that was hugely popular. Privately Ohser's own mental health was deteriorating, his diaries betraying how even his own self-justifications for his artistic output could no longer be maintained by him with any honesty (he had become a well respected art theorist promoting notions of "simplicity" and "beauty" as aesthetic ideals).

In 1944 he was bombed out and moved to a central Berlin location along with his closest colleagues, with whom he started to produce anonymous pamphlets and illegal posters critical of the regime, even as he simultaneously produced ever more "Father and Son" cartoons for popular public consumption. This contribution to "morale" however didn't remove him from an increasingly paranoid regime's suspicion. One colleague managed to escape, one was executed, and when he was arrested himself chose to take his own life.

These days his "Father and Son" cartoons still retain some popularity in Germany, though now they fulfil a curious cultural role as a reminder of a society in denial, under threat from within, and descending into a mockery of itself to the extent that every principle of note has been stripped so violently away only a numbing blandness remains in their place. Blandness is the sole cultural survivor and through the very fact that it alone has been afforded survival acquires an unintended eloquence in the condemnation of that which ordained it should be so. The same blandness itself as preserved in the record by Ohser and others, when examined at the relatively safe remove of perspective acquired over time, therefore also remains one of the several testimonies left by that regime to the moral bankruptcy of the society they engendered, and particularly of those who ensured its survival through decreeing it to be the only form of expression that a state distrustful of its own people could even contemplate endorsing. Inevitably even this endorsement itself would not reprieve those who conformed to its demands from ultimately falling victim to a terrible vengeance as the state's increasing paranoia, power and self-destructive tendencies grew to the unavoidable point of a total immolation of everything.

.

nordmann, perhaps our Belgian Hergé did the same with his "Tintin". Before the Nazi occupation: The Blue Lotus (Japanese Fascism), King Ottokar's Sceptre (German Nazism). But during the war he went on with neutral subjects. The only serious trouble with that he had after the WWII by the "Repression" because he had published the cartoons in the German minded press: "Le Soir"...

But to come back to "political cartoons" (I learned now that the term "cartoon" is for the first time used in relation with "Punch"?)
We, here in Belgium had many agressive "cartoons" (spotprenten (mockery images)) allowed by the constitution and its free press.
 
For instance about the Leopold II Congo Free State saga already in 1905...





And about social critique from our Ostend expressionist James Ensor 1889

Belgium in 1889 Doctrinary alimentation.



I wanted to say that it was even in the Kaiserliches Deutschland relatively free as with a "Simplicissimus"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicissimus
But oops as you read this:
"Although the magazine's satirical nature was largely indulged by the German government, an 1898 cover mocking Kaiser Wilhelm's pilgrimage to Palestine resulted in the issue being confiscated. Langen, the publisher, spent five years' exile in Switzerland and was fined 30,000 German gold marks. A six-month prison sentence was given to the cartoonist Heine, and seven months to the writer Frank Wedekind. All the defendants were charged with ″insulting a royal majesty″.^[4] Again in 1906 the editor Ludwig Thoma was imprisoned for six months for attacking the clergy."

And of course in Britain you had the "tame" Punch.

Kind regards, Paul.

There is a big argument over what exactly was the world's first comic strip, normally with two or more American newspapers vying over the claim and every now and then a plucky little European periodical joining the fray citing some conjoined pictures they once published, with speech bubbles and all, a short while before the yanks had even thunked of it. However it was our old friends the God Squad, as with most literary firsts, who were well ahead of the game as usual.

Much is made of the Reformation's leading lights' great indignation at the fact that the bad guys up in Rome had decreed that Europe's great unwashed shouldn't be allowed read the bible for themselves (in case they noticed all the plot flaws and plain stupid bits presumably), and that therefore it was best that it be kept in Latin with only men dressed as women given reading rights. However the truth, as with every religious claim, is always a little different to what the frocked ones would have us believe.

Centuries before politicians and monarchs currying the pope's favour started making bonfires of people for coming up with vernacular versions of the Good Book for general consumption, the very same outfit in Rome had long encouraged the production of what were commonly known (to Latin readers) as "biblia pauperum" (literally "paupers' bibles"). By the time Guthenburg, Caxton et al started churning their presses into high gear, hand-copied BPs were already being produced at a prodigious rate for sale, not to paupers despite the title, but to those rich enough to afford books and who wanted their bible in the form of a graphic novel. Latin was the favourite language but by no means compulsory - the guy credited with the concept, a missionary bishop called Ansgar who specialised in converting Odin worshippers to the fold, originally recommended that the language should reflect the target readership. In fact extant copies of pre-printing press biblia pauperum offer linguists today rare and valuable insights into various vernaculars of the early Middle Ages (Norwegian "norren" being a case in point).



The format of a BP page normally followed a set pattern. First you have two OT prophets engaged in a sort of theological metaphysical dick-measuring contest as to which of them can make the most important and accurate prediction. This is then followed by a sequence of theme-related scenes from both the OT and the NT which seem to fulfil both the lads' sooths. The page pictured above, for example, shows three incidents of guys defying certain death, essentially using the cheap plot "device" of getting a handy Jehovah to pluck each of them back into the land of the living - even after one of them has in fact totally snuffed it. Finally a sort of heavenly Simon Cowell & Co panel of judges pass judgement on whose metaphysical appendage was longest. And so on to the next page where a new cast of characters do much the same thing, repeated on each page until the readers have been introduced to all the bible's top people and most of the juicy plot bits, which they should then discuss and enthuse about amongst themselves until, before they know it, they've suddenly become all Christian.

It wasn't long of course before this populist method of spreading the word excited the already converted as much if not even more than the original target audience of wavering heathens. So popular did BPs become in fact that the advent of the printing press only saw their already considerable sales mushroom beyond the wildest expectations of converters and convincers alike, and by the time the Counter-Reformation had kicked into gear were being churned out by both sides in numbers approaching even those of the "grown up" version of the book. Ironically enough, given what we are led to believe regarding these people's much vaunted position on making bibles accessible, it was to be Protestant kill-joys like Savanarola and Oliver Cromwell, amongst other such humourless sods, who were to encourage their respective societies to finally outlaw these "Christian Theology For Dummies" publications. The RC powers-that-be persevered a little longer, but by the 18th century even they had given up, presumably because graphic novel lovers were by now getting their kicks from even better picture books based on the Marquis de Sade's hobbies, what exotic "creatures" the Conquistadors found before they killed them all, Asian sex manuals heavy on pics and light on translation, and other such forerunners to modern Hollywood standard blockbusters.

One of the most impressive BPs I have seen is available for viewing by appointment in Dublin's National Library. It was hand produced, probably in southern England, and uses both Irish and English language in the speech bubbles (or "speech scrolls", as was the fashion at the time) along with Latin for important bits like when the divine Simon Cowell and his panel colleagues arrive at the end of each page. It was a present from King John to a prominent Irish bishop in the 12th century and is assumed to be indicative of a crown policy John was pushing at the time of "look, we're jolly well really all the same bunch of affable guys, you know?" to help encourage the Irish gently (and cheaply) towards accepting potential English domination. That went well, didn't it?

nordmann, I really enjoyed your story and examples of cartoons. Thank you.
I think to recall that we also discussed the first pamphlets, which are in my opinion, while they were many times with drawings, also in a way predecessors of cartoons.

As I yesterday started to doubt if my James Ensor cartoon of 1889 was no "fake news" with its shit, and as I learned from you to seek always for the "sources" before publication, I started today some research...

And yes it was real history:
http://jamesensor.vlaamsekunstcollectie.be/nl/collectie/doctrinaire-voeding


And the social Ensor and rebel...
 
[url=http://www.phs.poteau.k12.ok.us/williame/APAH/readings/Ensor, In the Realm of the Social, Susan M Canning, Art in Am.pdf]The social Ensor and rebel[/url]

Kind regards, Paul.

Addendum to the former message.
As even via Google the link don't present properly, better then to insert in google "Ensor, In the Realm of the Social, Susan M Canning, Art in Am.pdf "  
And there you can find all the drawings and paintings that I mentioned and the context of their stories...
Kind regards, Paul.

Humour, as we know, is as culture-specific as it is time-specific. That which is funny in one country may not be seen as such in another, and something that had them rolling in the aisles even a few decades ago may leave everyone non-plussed, or even grossly offended, if it is repeated today.

Cartoons, with the best examples placing emphasis on the graphic over the text, are often among the best candidates to overcome the first barrier. They may not be so successful in overcoming the second barrier, but again because their eloquence resides as much in their visual impact as in whatever impact the original text was supposed to convey they can survive long after their intended sell-by date - maybe not as humour, per se, but certainly as vehicles of fundamental insight into the mores and principles of the society and age that created them.

Picking an example of this is almost pointless, given that just about any cartoon image from any period can be held up as some kind of proof of this characteristic. But I'll persevere anyway and take this one from the renowned cartoonist Charles Dana Gibson, an American illustrator who enjoyed huge popularity in his day (the late Victorian era) even outside his home country for a long running series of cartoons that ran in syndication under the banner "Gibson Girls". Every single cartoon from the hundreds in this series focused on "the female", or at least as Gibson understood the term. Given his huge contemporary popularity we can assume these portraits of "typical" females struck a resonant chord with many others too, and certainly based on what we know about the readership of the magazines in which he featured even with many more women than modern feminists may wish to contemplate, who will immediately identify the condescension and patronising attitude that Gibson brought with him to the sketchpad in every instance.

This one from 1902 is a good example of Gibson's work in that he has assembled what he regarded as all the principal archetypal female personalities that he liked to portray into one group. Its original title was "Studies in Expression: When Women are Jurors", and its humour, such as it was, hinged on the then commonly perceived absurdity of proposed legislative change in many western countries allowing women - of all things - to sit in courtroom juries.



Having an entire jury composed of women was not only a legal impossibility but would remain so in the US for quite a while longer, so his immediate audience would have seen "the joke" even before they examined the detail. However it is in the detail that we, well over a century later, can discern much of the prejudice and overt chauvinism directed at women that underlay Gibson's culture and time. Moreover we can even discern its precise nature. This image relies for its effect on the absurdity it intends to represent and, even if presented simply in the cause of humour, we know absurdity to be another way of expressing a perceived offence against natural order and expectations of this order grounded in realism that will provoke a reaction when pointed out (in this case mirth). But such provocation can only work if the person doing the pointing out also knows that their views are shared by the vast majority of their audience, so in an ensemble of stereotypes as Gibson has presented here we can in fact take each individual caricature within it and make a good guess as to which common prejudice applied in each instance he portrayed. As valuable and articulate historical indicators of once commonly held markers of common cultural identity then the assembled women in this cartoon collectively convey as much as any long treatise written on the subject might have hoped to achieve. Not bad for some lines sketched with ink on paper by one individual probably over a few short hours over a century ago.

Those of us old enough to remember Life magazine, with its huge global popularity and scope for influence in its day through its reliance on splendid photographic imagery, might reflect that it was Gibson's artwork, featured in the magazine from 1886 onwards, that was for several decades primarily responsible from its inception for growing and maintaining its huge sales.

Nowadays we can take any back issue of Life or similar publications and see the photographs therein as articulate interpreters of the age they represent, but this was a function first of graphic illustration and, when this technique was employed also in the service of humour, then the eloquence of these images from the past - at least when executed by talented artists immersed in the zeitgeist of their time - is only multiplied.

But perhaps you shouldn't be so hard on Life Magazine ... it was after all a product of its own time and place.

The motto of the first issue of Life (1885) was: "While there's Life, there's hope", and the new magazine set forth its principles and policies to its readers, as:

"We wish to have some fun in this paper...We shall try to domesticate as much as possible of the casual cheerfulness that is drifting about in an unfriendly world...We shall have something to say about religion, about politics, fashion, society, literature, the stage, the stock exchange, and the police station, and we will speak out what is in our mind as fairly, as truthfully, and as decently as we know how."

However by the mid 1930s, when Life was really getting into its stride, its new owner, Henry Luce (he bought it in 1936) described his vision for the magazine as being a focus on photographs, so that the American public could,

"... see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things — machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work — his paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many children; to see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed..."

Admitedlly his somewhat selective view, and so that presented to his readership, might well have been biased and subject to his own, and his targeted readership's prejudices (he had to remain popular to sell). But he/Life did at least aim to record the world and history as it occurred, with articles about Hitler and Stalin alongside those about Churchill and Eisenhower etc.

I wasn't hard on Life magazine - it's an excellent fund of historical source material and much of its photography is still a joy to look at, if only even for the craftsmanship and aesthetic value. I wasn't even hard on Gibson - he'd have been an excellent cartoonist in any era. It's a pity only in the most myopic retrospect that his sharp sense of the absurd and fine draughtsmanship belonged to the time they did.

Going back to my earlier point, the notion of humour changing over time was of course the impetus for Punch magazine's long-running weekly caption competition throughout the 1970s and 80s which invited members of the public to "improve" cartoons from earlier editions with funnier text accompaniment.

These days with so much time having elapsed even since the "improvements" there is a good argument for putting them up yet again for a 21st century take on the task. The "modern" caption below is from 1971, all of 49 years ago, whereas the original sketch was published 46 years before that again.

The Beauty of Maps on BBC4 featured this 1877 serio-comic map of Europe by Fred W Rose.





Cartoon map showing the political situation in Europe in 1877.
A vicious-looking Octopus - its eight lengthy tentacles extending into Northern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, encircling in tightening strangle-holds the territories of Finland, Poland, Bulgaria, the Crimea and Persia and even reaching as far as the Holy Land, Armenia and Khiva in Central Asia. The Turkish Empire, in the form of a prostrate turbaned figure lying across the Dardanelles and Bosphorus, pistol at the ready, protects his prize gold watch, Constantinople, which hangs around his waist.
Greece, an irritating crab, pinches his right elbow.
Hungary is held back from attacking Russia by his sister Austria.
Germany, in the form of its uniformed Emperor, surrounds itself with arms and weaponry, ready for any emergency.
France in the form of Marshal MacMahon, points a dangerous mitrailleuse at its German neighbour, eager to avenge its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71.
Italy is a young girl enjoying her newly found liberty, the Papal crown located in Rome.
Spain is the reclining figure of Alfonso, sleeping after his recent exertions.
The King of Belgium surrounds himself with his treasure.
Denmark waves her small flag proudly.
The British Isles, England a kneeling gentleman umbrella at the ready, Scotland a kilted highlander with claymore raised, and Ireland a hooded monk with Home Rule on his mind, stand on the sidelines determined at least to save the Turk's watch.
Sweden stands aloof in the North as a fur-clad woodcutter.

Priscilla's original post opened with "Cartoons are a very clever art form", and your 1877 map of Europe, Trike, based on the previous year's politics certainly shows a lot of clever political analysis as well as some very deft and clever graphic ability in getting the satirical representations of each country in humanoid form to fit their respective borders. But I feel that this is a rather benign - and even banal - use of cleverness, even by the standards of political caricature of the day.

Thomas Nast (and never was a man more aptly named) was a cartoonist frequently featured on the cover of Harper's Weekly magazine in the USA in the same period, not least because his undoubted cleverness and gift for caricature so accurately represented the early editorial policy of the organ - very much a pro-Republican and conservative stance that was never slow to identify "threats from within" in American society. A year before the European Map cartoon above, Nast produced the following cover for an 1876 edition following the contentious election of Rutherford B. Hayes as president.



The cartoon's caption "The Ignorant Vote" was probably superfluous, so accurately (and cleverly) had Nast represented his editors' view; that Hayes' policies on taking office had been compromised to the point of destruction in order to accommodate the wishes of a large chunk of his electorate, people who in any civilised society would be denied franchise on grounds of their innate, abject ignorance and stupidity.

On the left is the newly freed African American slave (the liberation of whom Nast had always supported but whose first exercise of their newly acquired enfranchisement promptly dismayed him). On the right is the thick, simian Irish immigrant (for whom neither Nast nor his editors had ever entertained the slightest sympathy, the Irish in New York in particular representing just about every threat to their ideals of autocratic enlightened Republican rule). These inherently stupid voter blocs had, between them, ignorantly but effectively now acquired the balance of power, a horrific prospect to Nast, his editors, and their readership alike.

Even at the time there were many in the USA who reckoned Nast went too far in his caricature of minorities. His depiction of African Americans, a group whose welfare he ostensibly supported and who he often indeed represented sympathetically, at least when he deemed the situation warranted it, when they "let him down" often went beyond even the most viciously cruel and overtly racist parody of many southern state cartoonists. His depiction of the Irish as ape-like, a trend that had been established in Britain to the extent that it is difficult to find examples from the period in which they approximate normal human features at all, was by no means the norm in the US, even within those parts of society that shared Nasts's distrust of this immigrant group and their increasingly flexing political muscle.

Nast was undoubtedly clever as both a communicator and caricaturist, proof of this being in his two undeniably notable artistic achievements of having originated the enduring "elephant" symbol for the Democratic Party as well as the pictorial version of "Santa Claus" with which we are all now most familiar. However 1876, and many point to this illustration in particular, marked a profound turning point in Nast's popularity. "The Man Who Made Presidents", as he had been dubbed by political colleagues and opponents alike, was increasingly seen as producing images so concise and pointed in their intent that they could be held up as not only demonstrably counter to his own employers' increasingly sophisticated political outlook, but even obnoxious to the vast majority of ordinary Americans who - whether they approved or not - were increasingly aware that a new post-bellum social order was being established, a radically new status quo in which some often uncomfortable accommodations had to be made which rendered many of the old divisions and thumbnail identities irrelevant, no matter how cleverly or succinctly these had previously been represented in Nast's cartoons.

Nast, like a lot of cartoonists before and since, was now seen by many as simply being "too clever for his own good". He stumbled along for another decade - his draughtsmanship and ability to encapsulate complicated concepts in succinct pictorial sketches undiminished - but was increasingly seen even by many of his magazine's own readers as being as much of a "threat" as any who he had so viciously lampooned pictorially over his thirty year career as America's foremost cartoonist.

"Cleverness", in other words, is no guarantee of success for any cartoonist. And for any cartoonist whose success depends on a social commentary in tune with the zeitgeist of their time, even a slight disjuncture in their relationship with that zeitgeist, especially for the cleverer ones, can spell their doom.

This is a link to the Princeton University collection of Thomas Nast's work.

click to select a work, then click again to enlarge it.
Thomas Nast


Nast launched repeated attacks on "Boss" Tweed and the corruption at Tammany Hall.

wiki:

Nast pressed his attack in the pages of Harper's, and the Ring was removed from power in the election of November 7, 1871. Tweed was arrested in 1873 and convicted of fraud. When Tweed attempted to escape justice in December 1875 by fleeing to Cuba and from there to Spain, officials in Vigo were able to identify the fugitive by using one of Nast's cartoons.

Some cartoons are simply vaguely humorous when they first appear, and only then reveal just how clever they and their creator really were years afterwards.

Back in 1954 regular Washington Post cartoonist Herb Lock ("Herblock!" was how he signed his work) produced this image depicting then vice president Richard Nixon and captioned "Here He Comes Now!". Nixon at that time was making a name for himself as a scourge of Democratic legislators who he claimed were "soft on communism" and up until then had certainly engendered some very polarised reactions to his political style - but only really within the political establishment, the popular public perception of the Californian congressman then rarely any more sophisticated than that he was young, dynamic and on a meteoric upwards career trajectory.



Lock's image of Nixon crawling out of a sewer had been prompted by a recent frantic and peripatetic tour of the US undertaken by Nixon in a vain attempt to rally votes ahead of mid-term elections in which the Republicans stood to lose control of both houses of congress. His apparently near-supernatural ability to pop up in geographically diverse areas often several times in one day suggested to Lock that he was criss-crossing the country via the sewers. However the image, five-o-clock shadow and all, struck a chord with the public and was the first example of an image of Nixon that the politician fought against for the rest of his career, and which the more he fought the more he simply drew attention to just how prophetically accurate it had been.

Nixon and Lock, as politician and political cartoonist, from that moment found their careers intertwined - which is understandable given the prestige of Lock's newspaper and the eventful tenure of high office that Nixon was to obtain. However time and time again Lock's simple sketches proved to have far more influence and effect, often with direct repercussions on their subject, than at first glance they would appear to merit (it was Lock, for example, who introduced the term "Tricky Dicky" in one such "innocuous" little daily lampoon). One of Lock's most popular and damning parodies of Nixon captioned "Position of Moral Leadership", published in 1974 as the by then disgraced president was being forced to resign in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, didn't even need to picture its subject at all:

Priscilla,

here you have it nearly all...sit back and enjoy...it is with English comments and spans the entire history...excellent in my humble opinion.

http://historiadesigneteoria.blogspot.com/2011/06/chapter-40-history-of-caricatures-and.html

Perhaps a bit longwinded for you? Perhaps more for Temperance? As she can chew Hilary Thompson's novels...I read only "A Place of Greater Safety" from her...https://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-Greater-Safety-Hilary-Mantel/dp/000725055X

For my penance, Priscilla, to have proposed this link to you, some political cartoons









And a Belgian one: Félicien Rops
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9licien_Rops



And about our Baron Empain, who became rich by his "work" in France...
https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8640740/file/8643749.pdf

Kind regards from Paul.

Getting back to the BPs mentioned above ...

Though this one isn't technically a "biblia pauperum" it's definitely a "something pauperum" or even a "biblia something". Long before Belgium produced Hergé and Tin Tin the area had thrown up another great comic book artist in Michiel van der Borch, a jobbing artist in the late 14th century whose illustrated psalters and "I'll do it for half the price" frescoes were in great demand around the Low Countries, and even in some slightly more elevated countries when the price was right. Along the way he produced this - which not without some justification can be termed the world's first true "comic book".

van der Borch in all likelihood looked at the great popularity of BPs and reckoned he could go one better. Why waste valuable space on each page with babbling prophets and angelic juries when it was an open secret that it was the bits in between that everyone really wanted - ripping yarns plucked from the verbiage of the Good Book replete with all those incidents of nudity, genocide, hand-to-hand combat, begetting, going forth and multiplying etc (ie. the "interesting bits") which lent themselves to some great illustrations that would, in turn, naturally be most guaranteed to excite the dopamine, estrogen, progesterone and probably not a few testosterone levels in potential customers. All this of course with the many aroused readers still safe in the pious knowledge that they were actually clocking up religious brownie points even as they lasciviously thumbed through the much worn pages of their copy.


Nimrod, probably the world's first comic book super villain, doing his rod stuff before being tamed by the descendants of Ham and Japheth

The first challenge was to find a good author, someone who could break the bible down into a coherent narrative with a healthy emphasis on sex, lust, violence and carnage, and van der Borch was lucky to already have the scribbles of Petrus Comestor readily to hand. Comestor, operating out of Notre Dame in Paris about two centuries earlier, had repackaged the bible in a sort of "best bits" series of theological student-friendly treatises to great acclaim, and his prodigious ability to pluck out the more exciting and dramatic episodes and build his stories around them had earned his books, especially the best selling "Historia Scholastica", great popularity in the region. The theology may have been on the light side but he made up for it in spades with oodles of divinely inspired melodrama, and given the identity of the "real" author therefore which literary critic of the day would have ever been foolish enough to give any of his books less than five stars? His Latin nickname was just the posh form of how he was even better known locally in the vernacular by his many fans - Pierre le Mangeur, or "Pete the Devourer", allegedly because he gobbled up knowledge (and thankfully for them regurgitated it in literary blockbuster form).


God, out of frame, does a number on the Tower of Babel (or prototype Saturn V rocket) while the descendants of Noah look on rather sheepishly

So, equipped with the Gobbler's text, van der Borch set about the relatively simple task of translating it into graphic form, and though we don't know if he ever managed to produce a complete series based on Comestor (who had tackled the entire bible all the way up to Acts), we are lucky that "Volume One - Genesis" has at least survived. We're even luckier that it has ended up in the British Library who have kindly digitised the book from cover to cover so that one can "page through" it at one's leisure online (link blow).


The God Squad on horseback arrive in the nick of time in true cavalry style to kick the shit out of the armies of Sodom and Gomorrah

To be honest there's a lot regarding this book and its provenance about which we just can't be sure. Scholars refer to the artist van der Borch as the "Egerton Master" because of another book which we're far more certain he did in fact illustrate (also a "Genesis" coincidentally enough, if one of much more conventional form), but reckon mainly on the basis of similarity of draughtsmanship, style, and on what we know regarding how he went about his commissions in general, that he's the artist behind this one too. We certainly cannot even guess much about the actual history of the book itself - it was acquired via the Bodleian Library as late as 1860 from a Viennese seller who unfortunately was less than forthcoming regarding how he had acquired it or from whom. It is suspected it came from a prestigious school in Vienna that had recently hit hard times, and that they might have received it in the past as a gift from the Austrian Emperor Maximillan I or his grandson Rudolph II, purely because we know they both had a good collection of early medieval manuscripts and that they'd gifted the school other cool stuff. Prior to this however is simply anyone's guess - van der Borch was one of several artists (ostensibly what you might call the first real "Flemish School") whose many commissions we know ranged far and wide across Europe, some of their stuff cropping up in places as far afield as Cashel in Ireland and Krakow in Poland.

However now this one has thankfully cropped up online too, hats off to the BL, and can be read here (you need to flip through quite a few blank pages before the actual carnage begins).

.

William A Rogers, one of the cartoonists who succeeded Nast, produced this drawing in response to the sinking of the Lusitania;

taken from America's Black & White book, 100 pictured reasons why we are at War by W A Rogers

Yes, Trike. As this and some of the examples I also posted illustrate, the problem with political cartoons, however undoubtedly clever some of them may be, is that their point and almost all of their humour depend completely on a detailed acquaintanceship on the part of the reader/viewer with contemporary events or, even more so as time goes on, with what are often increasingly obscure historical events.

On far more secure ground therefore, at least when it comes to potential for their humour's longevity, are those cartoons which ignore contemporary events as much as possible and instead concentrate on human nature.

This one from ancient Greece isn't probably the best example - one still needs to know a little about the lad Pentheus and the "sparagmos", in which Spartan women pulled good looking men apart limb from limb (I kid you not) - but variations of this particular image are extremely common in surviving Greek art of the period. Without getting bogged down in too much detail regarding Dionysian cults and all that stuff, it's enough to know that Pentheus's name means quite literally "Man Of Constant Sorrows" (the ordinary bloke, in other words), whose life, like ours, is simply a sequence of stumbles from one disaster to another right up until the final one, pictured below.

Pentheus, unlike Dionysus who he criticises as flippant and way too hedonistic, is a level-headed hard working chap who likes a good time like everyone else but believes in moderation, prudence, and planning for bad times. For this he is mocked by the gods (and the humans it has to be said), who conspire to put as many obstacles in his way as they can, all of which he stoically overcomes as he goes through life losing loved ones, his money, his wits on occasion, and so on - each time vowing to "learn from the experience" and bounce back even better than before. In the end he embarks on a physical self-improvement regime, deciding to beef himself up and look as handsome as he can.



In the story he's out and about looking handsome when he stumbles across (horror of horrors) a bunch of Dionysus's female supporters - a breed of female he regards in much the same light as we might judge "Beliebers" today or any thronged hordes of hysterical pubescents screaming support for their "pop idols" on stage (this gang called themselves the "menads"). He does the sensible thing (as always) and hides in a tree until the danger has passed. Unfortunately the lassies spot him and, so muscularly fit has Pentheus become of late, mistake him for a wild animal (as you would) and do what any well brought up hysterical mob of Spartan ladies would naturally do in the circumstances - they pull him down from his hiding place and tear him to pieces (while admiring him of course). Dionysus, like George Harrison's experience with the jelly-baby chuckers at the height of Beatlemania, looks on in horror in the extreme right of the image at this weird and extremely painful display of devotion to him, but is powerless to halt proceedings.

For the average Greek this story was not only very familiar but probably the one with which the average person most identified on a daily basis - it summed up the "Having a Bad Day", or "Oh, What's the Bleeding Point?!" feeling that we all face regularly, no matter how intelligently and responsibly we think we are conducting our affairs. No surprise then that it pops up on vases and reliefs with a healthy frequency - it was the ancient forerunner of "You Don't Have To Be Mad To Work Here, But It Helps" kind of signs that blight offices and homes around the world today. Euripides wrote a play about it - predating Tony Hancock by almost three thousand years - which helped raise the image to iconic status of course. And, as with Euripides' play (and indeed Hancock), the image was funny because it was tragic, and if we simply leave out the gory bits is still very much a comic trope with which we can identify today.

Thank you very much nordmann for all your "essais" in this thread.
Kind regards, Paul.

On the theme of cartoons and human nature, one of my own favourite cartoonists has for many years been Sergio Aragones, who I first encountered in the margins of every page in Mad Magazine back in my youth - his "doodles" averaging two dozen per issue and which, over the many decades in which he contributed to the comic, amounted to several thousand over all. None of them rely on text, and all of them target very human and readily identifiable foibles, conceits and frustrations common to all of us.

He also produced for the same publication an occasional strip called "The Shadow Knows", two examples of which I've included here, and which even any of Plato's young students back in the day would have immediately recognised as a homage to the famous Socratic cave allegory, with its story of the chained prisoners incarcerated within the darkness of the cave for whom reality resides completely in the shadow, not the substance. In Aragones' sketches the shadows reveal reality as we foolishly imagine it, as we vainly wish it, or as the gods themselves who can see through all our bullshit know it really to be.

And all very Jungian, as well as Socratic, nordmann! Excellent stuff - thank you.

"In sterquiliniis invenitur" - i.e. in the shit (depths/shadows/one's own bullshit?) you will find it (i.e. that which you most need to confront).

Dunno about Jungian or Socractian but I thought nordmann's latest were funny. As  in funny ha ha and not of the wry curled lip sort of cartoon humour higher up the thread - which sort is higher up the  ladder of wit I cannot say.
As daily social comment, many tabloid cartoonists are spot on with wringing out the funny side of the news - and anomalies there in. I used to love Giles when I was a child - and mentally likened his grandma to all the very ancient people I knew aged 40 plus. Please keep on churning all sorts of them out here alon  with the erudite essays about the topic.It is very interesting.

World Ocean Day today:

Cartoons are particularly suitable for being resurrected to reflect contemporary issues. On the day that England (note, not Scotland or Wales) reopens its pubs at 6:00am this morning (!), here's Martin Rowson's take on Hogarth's classic 'Gin Lane' (from The Guardian, 4 July 2020):

Henry De la Beche cartoon from 1830. The discovery of extinct animals also gave rise to the idea that human extinction was a possibility:

Thagomizer by Gary Larson:

Trike what one learns here everyday...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer
Regards from Paul.

Related to the Over a Barrel post on the Words of the Day, this cartoon from an Ohioan newspaper of 1909, on how to deal with adolescents:

Martin Rowson's view of Brexit:

more of MR's work here.....Martin Rowson
In a full-page editorial in 2017, in response to one of his Guardian cartoons, The Daily Mail denounced him and his work as “disgusting, deranged... sick and offensive.”

Triceratops wrote:

...  The Daily Mail denounced him and his work as “disgusting, deranged... sick and offensive...”

Which is something they would know a lot about.

A few short years ago Stanley McMurtry, a cartoonist who works under the name "Mac" in that organ, may have felt he was humorously illustrating his employers' thoughts with side-splitting exactitude when he produced this reference to EU immigration policy - note the rats.



Within hours of its publication however many students of the cartoon form unearthed its obvious predecessor and posted it on various social media platforms, rather to the chagrin of Mac himself who was offended, not at the natural contempt for his racist imagery but for the suggestion that he had plagiarised his source, a post-Anschluss Viennese Nazi magazine "Das Kleine Blatt" (The Small Leaf). His rats may have swapped one Abrahamic faith for another, but the "joke" was chillingly identical.



What Rowson and Mac share in this instance however is that both of them, by immediately triggering a hostile reaction from their cartoons' respective targets, can claim on that basis that they have produced a successful piece of work. And when it comes to cartoons they are both completely correct - by absolutely all the relevant criteria by which the effectiveness of a political cartoon image is objectively judged, they have both produced very fine examples.

The "Das Kleine Blatt" cartoon I had found to illustrate my point above had a vague familiarity to it in terms of its style, so I had a root around the internet to find out why. The result of my inquiry was quite germane (pardon the pun) to an earlier point I had made in relation to German cartoonists operating during the Nazi era and how the genre in that place at that time was populated by some very complex and conflicted individuals indeed.



The style was familiar because it belonged to Ladsislaus Kmoch, an Austrian cartoonist best known for his long running strip featuring the character "Tobias Seicherl", which featured in the same publication from 1929 through to 1939. Seicherl's humour was based in him being a philistine by nature and always a blindly unquestioning enthusiast for whichever political faction was in power, Kmoch's satirical take on the "typical Austrian" of the period who went along with whatever fad was in vogue with worryingly uncritical obedience. His dog Struppi however was "the voice of critical reason" who communicated directly with the reader even though his master was oblivious to his common sense, or to common sense at all.

Naturally Seicherl eventually became an ardent Nazi, and for a while Struppi - speaking for Kmoch - continued in his critical vein until, in 1938, the inevitable happened and the editors of what had once been a social-democratic organ but was now national-socialist ordered Kmoch to mute the dog and show a bit more solidarity with their new editorial guidelines.

Kmoch obliged, though seemingly lost interest in Seicherl once he was reduced to bland apolitical observations and quietly retired the character over a short period. At the same time, as the publication's best known contributor, he was also tasked with the main editorial cartoon of every issue - hence the antisemitic example cited earlier - though when the war started he was seemingly glad of the opportunity to switch careers completely, indicating at least a degree of discomfort with what he was being expected to deliver.

He joined the Wehrmacht's cartography unit and ended up with the job of producing "germanified" maps of newly conquered cities and towns on the eastern front, sometimes even having permission to choose the new names for streets and squares. Had the invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union gone as planned the inhabitants of many hundreds of these places would indeed have owed their address to Kmoch's imagination, some of which betrayed his satirical bent. He seemed to get a kick out of smuggling certain names past his superiors - such as "Lower Lady's Promenade" in Kiev which he intended to rechristen "Damenãrschestrasse" (Ladies' bums street), along with a few other examples of either his contempt for his superiors or lack of faith in their ability to ever really hold on to any of these places at all.

Towards the end of the war his unit surrendered to the British army and he was briefly a POW, during which time he started drawing Seicherl again, with Sprutti in full vocal attendance once more. This time his British captors encouraged this vein of humour and his character featured in several Allied propaganda publications for distribution in occupied Germany, which continued for several years as the effort to de-Nazify the population was in full swing. By then he was back in Vienna designing high quality porcelain patterns, his "day job" until his retirement, while frequently resurrecting Seicherl as a profitable sideline until his death. In his retirement years he threw himself into his other great passion - central European prehistory - and was curator and manager of the Korneuberg museum until his death.

An interesting and many layered man, in other words, though none of which could ever be deduced if judged solely on the strength of the one illustration he produced about the expulsion of Jews from Germany which is now probably what the internet at least will for ever "remember" him for. I wonder if the same can be said for Mr McMurtry?

nordmann wrote:

The "Das Kleine Blatt" cartoon I had found to illustrate my point above had a vague familiarity to it in terms of its style, so I had a root around the internet to find out why. The result of my inquiry was quite germane (pardon the pun) to an earlier point I had made in relation to German cartoonists operating during the Nazi era and how the genre in that place at that time was populated by some very complex and conflicted individuals indeed.
...............................

An interesting and many layered man, in other words, though none of which could ever be deduced if judged solely on the strength of the one illustration he produced about the expulsion of Jews from Germany which is now probably what the internet at least will for ever "remember" him for. I wonder if the same can be said for Mr McMurtry?

Thank you nordmann, for your illustrations and comments from your first reply and here I am again remembered that you warned me for the tricky internet when doing searches and how cautious one has to be about sources and all that.
I still remember about our discussions about the Dacian culture in the nowadays Romania that I only discovered by the "right" words in the "internet" that you provided to me.

Kind regards, Paul.

Paul wrote:

I still remember about our discussions about the Dacian culture in the nowadays Romania that I only discovered by the "right" words in the "internet" that you provided to me.

Yes - using Google to search for "Trajan and Maxinius's double penetration of Dacian defences" might not have been the best way to start.

But interesting you should bring up Dacia on a thread about cartoons - and particularly one in which competing claimants to have been the first ever bona fide "comic strip" or "graphic novel" in history have already been discussed. One such claimant in many people's eyes has always been Trajan's Column in Rome, which is not only a particularly impressive feat of engineering (that it still stands and is still legible after two millennia of weather, urban planning, Christian vandalism and the odd earthquake being ample proof of this), but also a masterpiece of bas-relief imagery even by Roman standards who were, after all, dab hands at churning out great examples of this medium in their sleep but who excelled even themselves when tasked with illustrating the entire Dacian campaign. They chose to do this not only aesthetically and with supremely crafted sculpture but also in the form of a visual narrative, draped in spiral fashion around the column from bottom to top, leading the reader's eye inexorably to the "punchline" atop the structure, the emperor himself (a "punchline" ruined by a later religious sect who replaced the lad with a delusional semi-fictional fisherman they have a thing for). Having arrived at Trajan's statue however the original intended audience/readership will not only have been invited to share in the adulation of their glorious leader, but their adulatory contribution to the emperor's dignitas and prowess will also have been informed in great detail by visual depictions of the feats, character, courage, strength, compassion, mercifulness, ruthlessness, guile and intelligence of the man en route.



Modern day comic books intended for syndication, and of which Asterix has always in my view been a prime and masterful example in this respect, present something of a technical challenge to their creators beyond just telling a good yarn in visually entertaining style. Some publications will wish to run the story periodically as a single four-frame "strip", some will want two rows of these per issue, some a half-page format, some an entire page of graphics per edition, and of course the whole should still be presentable in folio form containing the entire work. The author and/or illustrator therefore has to keep these divisions in mind while composing the work - the reader of whichever format must not feel short-changed so it is important to distribute at least one visual or verbal gag per "strip", possibly a more convoluted gag to suit the publication of larger chunks, while - and this is the real genius bit - ensuring the whole retains a narrative cohesion in terms of development and retention of interest unhampered by a "stop start" series of gags that the reader might experience as an intrusive and obvious mechanical artifice, even if that is exactly how the story has been assembled.

The creators of Trajan's Column encountered a similar challenge. Having opted for a spiral "strip" ascending the column they knew that it would still be unrealistic to expect their intended audience all to then have to walk together in a counter-clockwise movement around the structure in order to follow the narrative (though for those with an hour or so to kill this is still the best way to get full value from the experience). Their solution was sublime. They isolated within the narrative a dozen or so key events, split these into two groups, and then made sure that the elements within each group aligned with each other vertically when viewed from a designated static vantage point on the ground. By standing at one of these points the reader received an abridged version of Trajan's campaign. If the reader then moved to the other point they received a more detailed but still abridged version. If they took the circular ambulatory route however they then received the whole interpretative shebang.



This National Geographic article which features the above legend also has a great interactive graphic whereby you can virtually walk in circles around the structure and follow the story, with much greater visual clarity than a poor Roman at ground level might ever have hoped for. It explains where these key images occur and what they relate to, as well as the two vantage points from which these were intended to be viewed.

Thank you very much nordmann for this example of pictorial narrative on Trajan's Column and the technique behind it. I read it all with great interest.
I was there in Rome and saw the column as a monument, as the Arch of Titus, not that much documented beforehand and with a partner not interested in that stuff (that's being with two). Although having done Greek-Latin studies not aware that in the time all those reliefs and pictures were coloured. I had to wait for you to be explained some years ago that my Venus of Milo and other Greek statues, the same as the Roman ones had a colour.



In Dutch and German we have perhaps a better designation of "a story explained with pictures":
"Beeldverhaal" (we say in dialect: tekenverhaal), "Bild(er)geschichte", in French: they say: bande dessinée and what they say in English: cartoon strip? comic?.

Yes that "pictorial story" seems to have quite a history...
https://blog.britishmuseum.org/a-history-of-storytelling-through-pictures/

https://www.ancient.eu/Egyptian_Book_of_the_Dead/





And yes that fourteen pictures Christian story



Kind regards, Paul.

Re Tory Kern(e)s in tights - lots of 'em here - Dom showing his legs off like a Wolford (posh tights) ad. Cove, sadly, done up as a preacher, not in his tights. Rishi looks suitably dashing, making off with all the dosh.

When cartoons like this criticising a Tory government start appearing in the Times, then you know they're in trouble:

My late mother used to take The Telegraph and I can remember that paper occasionally querying choices or suggestions by the (then) Conservative government though that's several years ago.  I remember saying to people that I didn't trust Bojo at the time of the last election but they were convinced Mr J was the person to conclude the ins and outs of Brexit.  Bo-Jo couldn't have foreseen the pandemic but I guess expecting the unexpected goes with the territory with the PM job.  The Times cartoonist, Peter Brookes, definitely has a flair for HIS job.

There's also no 'snout in the trough' nor indeed any 'lying double-tongue', neh? (both are choice bits of delicious offal, which are readily available if you're living on the continent).

Well spotted Meles re snout in the trough. 

View from Bangkok:

Peter Brookes' view of COP 26:

After watching Doctor Zhivago, Bill Mauldin's 1958 cartoon on Boris Pasternak. This image won Mauldin his second Pulitzer Prize: