Introduction

Since their spectacular rise to public prominence in the 1840s, when the satirical magazine Punch commissioned John Leech to create the first series of ‘Mr Punch Cartoons’, humorous, politically motivated graphic satire has been a popular mainstay of British journalism. Throughout the twentieth century, cartoons relentlessly appeared in all sorts of newspapers, yet a twenty-first-century reader reflecting on the cartoons created in the first half of the previous century may find it difficult to fully realise the immense impact and journalistic importance of the cartoon in an era before the near universalisation of television consumption.

The twentieth century saw many events that were recorded in newspaper cartoons: the First World War, the 1916 Easter Rising, women's suffrage, the Second World War, the Cold War, inter alia. In fact, by the early twentieth century, the inclusion of political cartoons in editorial pages was already well established as a key element of news coverage, reinforcing the editorial standpoint of a particular article or newspaper.

It has been postulated that humorous pictures, cartoons and caricatures are more easily created and understood than comical text. In this sense, the humorous picture serves to communicate a more credible and digestible message than a similar conveyance presented in other media, offering immediacy and accessibility. Most political cartoons are designed to influence viewers with regard to specific political events of the day, but what is the essence of their appeal?

Some of the appeal, of course, is due to the easy visual accessibility of a picture. But some must be due to the visceral punch a cartoon can give to an opinion, affording the reader a thrill of outrage or affirmation they would never get from written paragraphs (Dooley and Heller 2005: 15).

Cartoons appeal to readers on a number of levels. Perhaps most importantly, their pictures do not require a high degree of literacy, a fact to which their rapid rise in popularity during the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries is often attributed.