Politics, by and large, is about violence. When cartoonists become involved in politics, they may also become entangled in violence -- sometimes falling victim to it, sometimes provoking it, and sometimes advocating or justifying it.

The connection here is historically deep and thematically broad. Before the popularity of newspapers, the basic elements and techniques of modern cartoons -- caricature, allegory, captions, even word balloons and sequential juxtaposition -- were being developed by engravers and printers. Their work was published as pamphlets, handbills, and posters. The resemblance between newspaper cartoons, comic strips and comic books on the one hand, and propaganda posters and billboard advertisements on the other, remains in evidence to this day. These techniques, as we shall see, have been employed by opposing sides during wartime, by racists and religious zealots, and by revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries alike.



Revolution and Reaction

Both Benjamin Franklin and Paul Revere drew cartoons in favor of American independence. The most famous, one of Franklin's, shows a segmented snake, its pieces labeled with the names of the American colonies. The caption reads "Join or Die" -- which warns the colonies about the dangers of disunity, and might also be read as a threat against Loyalists.

Cartoons both for and against the French Revolution centered on the same device, the guillotine. In 1793 Villeneuve produced a print displaying the severed head of Louis XVI as a warning for "other royal jugglers." A reactionary cartoon from the same period showed "Robespierre guillotining the executioner, having had everyone else in France guillotined."



English prints occasionally advocated the local application of French techniques. One, titled A Cure for National Grievances, showed a pig (representing the masses) preparing to execute an ass (George III), while another pig prods at a broken crown. Nearby signs helpfully identify the street as "Revolution Place," just outside the office of "Dr. Guillotine." The doctor advertises: "The King's Evil cured gratis."

Such cartoons have never been the sole property of either end of the political spectrum -- left or right. During the Cuban revolution, for example, cartoonists like Marco Behemaras and Virgilio Martinez Gainza embedded pro-Castro messages in their comics for the illegal satirical paper Mella. Not all their colleagues shared their agenda: After the revolution, Antonio Prohias fled to the U.S., where he created "Spy vs. Spy" for Mad Magazine. [note 1]



Race and Religion

If the combination of politics and cartooning can be incendiary, the mix only becomes more volatile with the addition of religion. Religious tensions have long produced unflattering images of rival sects or divergent beliefs. Religious caricature often takes the form of literal demonization: Protestants produced engravings of The Papist Devil in the late 15th century; about fifty years later, Catholics imagined The Devil Playing Luther as a Pair of Bagpipes.



These Reformation-era attacks largely borrowed imagery from a well-established anti-semitic tradition. Joshua Trachtenberg offers a small sample from this artistic canon:

"One of the earliest dated sketches of a medieval Jew, from the Forest Roll of Essex (1277), bears the superscription Aaron fil[ius] diaboli, 'Aaron, son of the devil.' The sixteenth-century series of prints entitled 'Juden Badstub' shows the devil assisting the Jews in the functions of the bathhouse, drawing water with them, building up fires, etc. A seventeenth-century print, 'Der Juden Synagog', depicts the devil as a participant in the Jewish ritual. The notorious figure of the Judensau, portraying the sow as the mother feeding her Jewish offspring, one of the commonest caricatures of the Jew in the Middle Ages, occurs also with the devil represented as supervising the operation. Satan's semitic features are often emphasized with grotesque exaggeration (Mephistopheles is usually swarthy, hook-nosed, curly-headed); when he is portrayed with a Jew badge on his cloak, as we find him several times, the allusion is clear enough." [note 2]



During the Reformation, Protestants and Catholics alike made the most of this reliable prejudice. Each sect sought to identify, rhetorically or iconographically, its rivals with the Jews, and therefore (it was thought) with blasphemy and devil-worship. More recently, Muslims have also adopted the tactic of labeling all enemies as Jews. An Iranian caricature of Saddam Hussein, for example, features the Star of David on his beret.



The Nazis, of course, were the great masters of anti-semitic propaganda -- and they had the cartoons to prove it. Beginning in 1923, Der Sturmer published Nazi material for a lower-class, uneducated audience; it specialized in anti-semitic cartoons and pornography. The tabloid's publisher, Julius Streicher, was hanged at Nuremberg for inciting racial hatred. Unfortunately, the tradition did not die with him. Even now, neo-nazi extremists still recycle old stereotypes in cartoons ridiculing Jews and people of color, denying the veracity of the holocaust, and agitating against mixed marriages.



Anti-semitic cartoons also continue to appear in newspapers from the Middle East. (Most infamously, an Iranian paper sponsored a contest, inviting cartoonists to mock or deny the Holocaust. [note 3]) One common convention builds from (and on) the tendency to wholly identify all Jewish people with the government of Israel; it becomes only too easy to represent the entire country in the figure of a single caricatured Jew. Through this substitution, the blame for Israel's policies become attached to the Jews per se, and pre-existing anti-semitism is mobilized in opposition to the Israeli government.



Of course, the Jews are not alone. Nearly every abused minority has fallen victim to unwarranted, insulting caricatures. Most recently, in May 2006 -- just months after the Jyllands-Posten debacle [note 4] -- a state-run newspaper in Iran printed a cartoon that featured a cockroach speaking Azeri, the language of the country's largest ethnic minority. Hundreds marched in Tabriz in protest, breaking the windows of government offices. In Orumieh, rioters went further, setting fire to government buildings and to the offices of the offending paper. At least four died in the unrest. In response, Iranian officials ordered the paper closed, arrested its editor and the cartoonist, and issued an official apology.

In the US, African-Americans are the most consistently maligned group. Sometimes Black caricatures appear as merely condescending stereotypes, or puerile attempts at racist humor. (For examples, see Fredrik Stromberg, Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History, Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003.) Other times, they are something still worse -- calculated efforts to stir popular hatred and advance the politics of exclusion and inequality. This use of cartooning reaches far back in our history. For example, racist cartoons were used to express -- and, as likely, to stimulate -- Southern fears during Reconstruction, presenting an image of haughty and vicious ex-slaves eager to revenge themselves by dominating their former masters.



These same racist fears were turned against the US by the Axis during World War II. An Italian poster uses racist stereotyping to depict Americans (especially African-Americans) as barbarians. The poster, by Gino Boccasile, forcefully depicts American soldiers as racially inferior brutes seeking to deface classical culture through crass commercialism and, not incidentally, rape Italian women in the process.


The use of cartoons in wartime propaganda will be discussed further in Part Three.

Notes to Part Two

1 - "Spy vs. Spy" is now in the hands of a leftist, Peter Kuper.
2 - Trachtenberg 26.
3 - An Israeli paper responded to the Iranian contest by asking Jews to submit their own anti-semitic cartoons.
4 - For more on the Mohammad caricatures and the controversy they provoked, see Part One of this series.

Links of interest:

Der Sturmer

Iranian Holocaust Denial Cartoons

Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoon Contest

Bibliography for Parts One and Two (in Comics)

All rights reserved by the author.

Kristian Williams has written about comics and cartooning for some unlikely publications, including the Progressive, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Cuny Advocate, and the "Is it a book?" website. He is also the author of American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination (South End Press, 2006), and of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (with a second edition forthcoming, also from South End).

Part One: Cartoons, Seriously


Cartoons can cause a lot of trouble.

In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten printed twelve caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, some of which were deliberately insulting. One showed Mohammed with horns, another with a bomb in his turban.

Months later, when the images gained wide circulation, riots erupted throughout the Muslim world. At least 145 people died. Danish embassies were trashed, as were the offices of several other European countries, the US, the EU, and the World Bank. Muslims began a boycott of Danish products. Several Middle Eastern countries withdrew their ambassadors from Denmark, the Danish government advised its citizens to leave Pakistan, and Chechnya briefly expelled all Danish organizations -- including relief agencies.

Meanwhile, Islamic clerics offered a million-dollar bounty on the cartoonists responsible. And Pakistan asked the US to extradite two people who posted the cartoons on their website. The charge is blasphemy; it carries the death penalty.

In the US, the debates surrounding the cartoon riots relied mostly on well-rehearsed platitudes. Some commentators reduced the conflict to one of free speech and censorship; others insisted that it was more an issue of cultural sensitivity and the limits taste and civility place on political humor. More aggressive interpretations presented the cartoon controversy as one front in a over-arching "clash of civilizations" -- usually with the implication that the episode demonstrated some barbaric intolerance inherent in Islam. And a great many people simply threw up their hands, with the feeling that it's just damn silly to get so upset over something as trivial as newspaper cartoons.

One aspect that almost totally escaped public notice, however, is the similarity of these events to other crises from throughout the history of cartooning. This wasn't the first time that a cartoon provoked international outrage, a diplomatic crisis, or violence. In fact, it's almost a tradition.



"Them Damn Pictures!"


The Danish cartoonists are not the first to face a bounty. In 1914, the German government offered 12,000 guilders for the body of Louis Raemaekers because he had drawn cartoons depicting German atrocities in Belgium. Acting under diplomatic pressure, the Dutch government prosecuted Raemaekers for endangering Holland's neutrality. He was acquitted at trial, but for years he continued to receive anonymous threats, his travel was restricted, and his exhibits were censored. The Cologne Gazette warned, "After the war Germany will settle accounts with Holland, and for each calumny, for each cartoon of Raemaekers, she will demand payment with the interest that is her due." [note 1]



In the 1930s, Japan responded to an insulting caricature of the Emperor in a more sophisticated, and ultimately more effective, manner -- using its diplomatic and commercial influence to punish Vanity Fair. As a result, several American companies withdrew their advertising from the cash-strapped magazine and the US government officially denounced the cartoon. Vanity Fair collapsed soon after.

These examples show us something of the power of cartooning. Censorship, after all, is one way of taking cartoons seriously. Rioting is another. If such reactions seem irrational to most Americans, it is in large part because we've grown used to ignoring our cartoonists, or seeing their work as an irrelevant amusement. As Clay Butler, the artist behind Sidewalk Bubblegum, put it, "In America, political cartooning is largely an impotent exercise. . . . It doesn't do anything. . . . The humorists always have greater leeway [for] speaking truth, but at the same time, our truth has negligible effect because people see us as 'funny people'." [note 2]



It hasn't always been so. After Boss Tweed appeared in Harper's Weekly with a money bag where his head belonged, he remarked, "I don't care what they print about me, most of my constituents can't read anyway -- but them damn pictures!" [note 3]



In 1902 Pennsylvania Governor Samuel Pennypacker used legislation to voice his objections to caricature. After Charles Nelan drew the governor as a parrot in the Philadelphia North American, Pennypacker introduced a bill outlawing


"any cartoon or caricature or picture portraying, describing, or representing any person either by distortion, innuendo, or otherwise, in the form or likeness of beast, bird, fish, insect or other inhuman animal, thereby tending to expose such person to public hatred, contempt or ridicule." [note 4]


Several other states followed suit, but the laws were generally ignored.



Dissident cartoonists do not always fare as well as Nelan, or even Raemaekers. The cartoonist Rius (aka Eduardo Del Rio) so irritated the Mexican government that in 1969 the military arrested him and staged a mock execution. During the dirty war of the 1970s, the Argentinean government went even further. Many cartoonists were forced into exile. Others, including the country's most famous comics writer, Hector Oesterheld, were arrested and "disappeared." A government official later explained, "We did away with him because he wrote the most beautiful story about Che ever done." [note 5]


Links of Interest:

Mohammad Caricatures

The Global Cartooning Crisis

Sidewalk Bubblegum


Notes to Part One

1 - Allison, vol. 1, vii-viii.
2 - Clay Butler, interview (by phone). February 17, 2006.
3 - Hoff 77.
4 - Caswell, 7-8.
5 - Pilcher and Brooks, 215.


Bibliography (in Comics)

Kristian Williams has written about comics and cartooning for some unlikely publications, including the Progressive, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Cuny Advocate, and the "Is it a book?" website. He is also the author of American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination (South End Press, 2006), and of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (with a second edition forthcoming, also from South End).

The Silicon Vultures enter the Captain's family. You can pre-order your vinyl by clicking here.