Political cartoon

Based on Wikipedia: Political cartoon

The Art of Making Powerful People Uncomfortable

In 1820, the British government did something extraordinary: they paid a cartoonist to stop drawing. George Cruikshank, one of the most talented satirical artists of his generation, received a bribe not to depict King George IV "in any immoral situation." The very fact that the Crown felt compelled to pay off a man with a pen and ink tells you everything you need to know about the power of political cartoons.

These single images—combining caricature, symbolism, and razor-sharp wit—have toppled corrupt politicians, swayed presidential elections, and gotten their creators threatened, sued, and even killed. They reduce complex political situations to a single devastating visual that anyone can understand in seconds.

And it all started with a stock market crash.

From Market Collapse to National Pastime

In 1720, England experienced one of history's first major financial bubbles. The South Sea Company, granted a monopoly on trade with South America, saw its stock price soar to absurd heights before collapsing spectacularly. Fortunes evaporated. Families were ruined. Parliament erupted in scandal.

William Hogarth responded with an "Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme"—a crowded, allegorical image depicting the madness of speculation. While not quite a political cartoon in the modern sense, it established something crucial: visual satire could capture public outrage in ways that words alone could not.

Hogarth was primarily an artist and moralist. His famous series "A Rake's Progress" from 1732 told the story of Tom Rakewell, a merchant's son who inherits a fortune and proceeds to squander it on luxury, gambling, and prostitutes. The eight sequential images follow Tom from wealth to debtor's prison to Bethlem Royal Hospital—the infamous "Bedlam" asylum. It was social criticism through sequential art, a distant ancestor of both the comic strip and the political cartoon.

But Hogarth aimed at society's vices broadly. For someone to turn this visual power directly at politicians and kings, England had to wait for George Townshend.

The Moment Politics Became Personal

George Townshend, First Marquess Townshend, was an aristocrat, a soldier, and—crucially—an amateur artist with a vicious sense of humor. In the 1750s, he began producing caricatures of his political rivals that circulated among London's elite. These weren't abstract moral lessons like Hogarth's work. They were personal attacks, designed to make specific powerful people look ridiculous.

This was new. And it was dangerous.

The true explosion came during the French Revolution, when two London artists transformed political cartooning into an art form: James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson.

Gillray, in particular, pushed boundaries that would make modern cartoonists nervous. He depicted King George III as a "pretentious buffoon." He mocked prime ministers and generals with savage glee. His primary target, though, was Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he portrayed with such consistent venom that some historians credit Gillray with shaping English public opinion against France.

The era suited his talents perfectly. British politics in the late 18th century was brutal—parties attacked each other with "great vigour and not a little bitterness," as one contemporary put it. Personal insults were standard fare. In this environment, Gillray's "incomparable wit and humour, knowledge of life, fertility of resource, keen sense of the ludicrous, and beauty of execution" made him, quite simply, the best in the world at what he did.

He is now remembered as the father of the political cartoon.

How a Magazine Changed Everything

For the first century of their existence, political cartoons were sold as individual prints in London shops. You would browse the latest offerings, purchase a broadsheet, and perhaps frame it or pass it around among friends. It was a thriving business, but it limited circulation to those who could afford to buy prints and who happened to live near the right shops.

In 1841, everything changed.

Henry Mayhew and Ebenezer Landells founded a new satirical magazine called Punch. Within a year, it was purchased by the publishing firm Bradbury and Evans, who saw its potential. New mass-printing technologies were emerging, and they used them to transform Punch from a small periodical into a national institution.

The magazine gave us the very word "cartoon" in its modern sense. In 1843, the British Parliament was soliciting designs for murals to decorate the new Houses of Parliament. Artists submitted large preliminary sketches called "cartoons"—from the Italian "cartone," meaning a large piece of cardboard. Punch, with characteristic cheek, began calling its own political illustrations "cartoons" as a joke.

The name stuck. And suddenly, political cartoons had a distribution mechanism that could reach millions.

The Punch Brotherhood

The artists who gathered around Punch in its early decades formed what became known as "The Punch Brotherhood." John Leech, Richard Doyle, John Tenniel, Charles Keene—these names may be unfamiliar now, but in Victorian England they were celebrities. Charles Dickens himself joined Bradbury and Evans after leaving his previous publisher in 1843, and the Brotherhood's influence extended throughout Victorian literary culture.

The most significant of them was John Tenniel.

For over fifty years, Tenniel served as Punch's chief cartoon artist, developing a style of physical caricature and symbolic representation that has "changed little up to the present day." If you've ever seen a political cartoon depicting a portly politician as a pig, or a nation as a fierce lion, or an idea as a human figure in classical robes, you're looking at conventions Tenniel helped establish.

His work also revealed the medium's capacity for ugliness. In 1857, following the Indian Rebellion against British colonial rule, Punch published Tenniel's "Justice" and "The British Lion's Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger"—vengeful illustrations that captured (and stoked) public fury. The same techniques that could hold power accountable could also dehumanize colonial subjects and drum up support for brutal reprisals.

Political cartoons, it turned out, were a tool. Their moral valence depended entirely on who wielded them.

The Man Who Destroyed Boss Tweed

By the mid-19th century, major newspapers across the Western world featured editorial cartoons. But no cartoonist demonstrated the medium's raw political power more dramatically than Thomas Nast.

Nast was a German immigrant working in New York City, and he brought rigorous European draftsmanship to American political controversies. His timing was perfect: the Civil War and its aftermath gave him no shortage of subjects. He drew 160 editorial cartoons attacking "Boss" William Tweed, the leader of Tammany Hall, New York's notoriously corrupt political machine.

Tweed's organization had swindled the city out of millions of dollars through rigged contracts, fraudulent vouchers, and systematic bribery. Nast's cartoons made this corruption visceral. He depicted Tweed as grotesquely fat, his pockets bulging with stolen money, his face the picture of smug criminality.

The campaign worked. Tweed himself reportedly recognized Nast's power, complaining that his constituents might not be able to read critical newspaper articles, but they could certainly understand "them damned pictures." The Tweed Ring collapsed. Its leader fled to Spain, where he was eventually recognized and captured—identified, according to legend, from a Nast cartoon.

American art historian Albert Boime later assessed Nast's influence in sweeping terms: "As a political cartoonist, Thomas Nast wielded more influence than any other artist of the 19th century." Presidents Lincoln and Grant both acknowledged his effectiveness in their campaigns. Boime concluded that Nast's "impact on American public life was formidable enough to profoundly affect the outcome of every presidential election during the period 1864 to 1884."

Twenty years of presidential elections, shaped significantly by one man's drawings.

Symbols That Became Permanent

Some of Nast's creations outlived any specific political battle. He didn't invent the Democratic donkey—Andrew Jackson's opponents had used it mockingly decades earlier—but Nast's cartoons cemented the image. The Republican elephant, however, was largely his creation, first appearing in an 1874 cartoon.

These animal symbols persist today, instantly recognizable shorthand that American cartoonists still employ 150 years later.

Earlier still, British cartoonists had created John Bull, a stout, plainspoken personification of England that emerged around 1790 from the collective imagination of Gillray, Rowlandson, and their contemporaries. John Bull was the British equivalent of what Uncle Sam would become for America—a human figure representing national character, useful whenever a cartoonist needed to show "the nation" reacting to events.

These symbols reveal something important about how political cartoons work. They translate abstract concepts—nations, parties, ideologies—into visual characters that can interact, fight, embrace, or betray each other. Complex geopolitics becomes a drama with recognizable players.

Three Cartoons That Made History

Certain political cartoons have transcended their immediate moment to become historical documents in their own right.

Benjamin Franklin's "Join, or Die" from 1754 may be the first American political cartoon. It depicted the American colonies as segments of a severed snake, with the message that unity was essential for survival. The image was revived during the American Revolution and remains instantly recognizable today.

"The Thinkers Club" from 1819 responded to the Carlsbad Decrees, a set of repressive measures imposed on German universities. The decrees established surveillance of professors and students, censored publications, and banned organizations deemed politically dangerous. The cartoon captured the suffocating atmosphere with dark humor—intellectuals literally muzzled, their thoughts policed.

E. H. Shepard's "The Goose-Step" appeared in Punch in 1936, as Adolf Hitler was rearming Germany in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Shepard—better known today as the illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh—drew the geese of Europe marching in Nazi formation. It was a warning, published when many still hoped that accommodation with Hitler was possible.

How Cartoons Actually Work

A political cartoon typically does something quite specific: it takes two unrelated things and smashes them together. The collision creates meaning.

Consider a cartoon depicting a politician as a used car salesman. Neither politics nor used car sales is inherently funny. But the combination—this senator, with his practiced smile, trying to sell you a lemon—creates an instant commentary on trustworthiness, motive, and the gap between public promises and private reality.

This technique mirrors something true about politics itself, where deals are constantly made connecting unrelated proposals behind closed doors. The cartoon makes visible what is normally hidden.

There's also a psychological dimension. As Israeli cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen, creator of the comic strip Dry Bones, has explained, his goal is "to make people laugh, which makes them drop their guard and see things the way he does." He describes his objective as an attempt "to seduce rather than to offend."

Humor disarms. Once you've laughed at a politician, you've already half-agreed with the cartoonist's critique. The intellectual argument follows the emotional reaction, not the other way around.

The Pocket Cartoon and the Daily Ritual

In 1939, Osbert Lancaster invented something called the "pocket cartoon" for the Daily Express. It was a single-panel, single-column drawing offering a topical political joke—small enough to fit in the corner of a newspaper page, quick enough to absorb in seconds.

When the Guardian's pocket cartoonist David Austin died in 2005, his obituary captured the form's strange importance: "Newspaper readers instinctively look to the pocket cartoon to reassure them that the disasters and afflictions besetting them each morning are not final. By taking a sideways look at the news and bringing out the absurd in it, the pocket cartoonist provides, if not exactly a silver lining, then at least a ray of hope."

This is a peculiar and underappreciated function. The pocket cartoon doesn't just inform or persuade. It provides emotional relief. It says: yes, things are bad, but we can still laugh, which means we haven't been defeated yet.

When Cartoons Become Dangerous

The power that makes political cartoons valuable also makes them dangerous.

In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve editorial cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims consider any visual representation of Muhammad to be forbidden, and the cartoons—some of which associated the prophet with terrorism—sparked worldwide protests, diplomatic crises, and violence. Over 200 people died in the ensuing unrest.

A decade later, in January 2015, two gunmen attacked the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine that had published similar cartoons. Twelve people were killed, including several of the magazine's most prominent cartoonists.

These events raised profound questions about the limits of satire, the responsibilities of artists, and the clash between different conceptions of sacred and secular. Defenders of the cartoonists invoked free speech as an absolute value. Critics argued that mocking a minority religion's most sacred figure was gratuitously cruel, designed to provoke rather than enlighten.

The debate continues. What's not in question is that editorial cartoons, in an era of viral images and global communication, can ignite international crises in ways their 18th-century inventors never imagined.

The Modern Landscape

Today, political cartoons appear on newspaper editorial pages, in dedicated magazines like The New Yorker, and increasingly online where they can spread across social media in minutes. Some, like Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury, have migrated from the editorial page to the regular comic strip section, telling ongoing stories with recurring characters rather than offering single-panel commentary.

The form has been recognized with prestigious awards since 1922, when the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning was established. In Britain, the Press Awards honor a "Cartoonist of the Year." Archives like the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in the United States and the British Cartoon Archive in the United Kingdom preserve these ephemeral works for historians.

Yet newspapers are shrinking, and editorial cartoonist positions have been cut along with other staff. Some cartoonists now work independently, publishing online and relying on subscriptions or donations. The economic model is precarious, even as the demand for visual political commentary—judging by social media engagement—has never been higher.

The Irreplaceable Function

What makes political cartoons persist, despite all the technological and economic upheaval of the past three centuries?

Perhaps it's this: they make abstract power concrete. A policy proposal is invisible. A budget is a spreadsheet. A political ideology is a set of claims about how the world works. None of these can be seen directly.

But a cartoon can show you a fat cat sitting on a pile of money while ordinary people struggle below. It can show Lady Justice peeking out from under her blindfold. It can show a politician as a puppet with corporate logos pulling the strings.

In a single image, taking seconds to absorb, a cartoon can crystallize months of reporting, years of lived experience, and centuries of political theory into something any human being can immediately understand.

That's why George Cruikshank had to be bribed. That's why Boss Tweed feared "them damned pictures." That's why cartoonists have been murdered for their work.

The pen really is mightier than the sword—especially when it can draw.