The Global Memory of the Line – 2 | Punch and the Institutionalisation of British Humour

How Punch, or the London Charivari transformed cartooning into a lasting British institution—and gave the modern editorial cartoon its name.

This article is the second part of “The Global Memory of the Line,” a series exploring the historical development of cartoon and satire magazines around the world.

In July 1843, ragged men, women and children appeared in the pages of a young London humour magazine.

They stood inside an exhibition hall surrounded by large, richly framed works of art. The paintings celebrated power, privilege and heroic history. The visitors, by contrast, were barefoot, hungry and exhausted.

One boy stared at a painted child dressed in luxurious clothes. The painted child possessed the costume, leisure and social protection denied to the real child standing before him.

The drawing was titled:

Cartoon, No. 1: Substance and Shadow.

Its artist was John Leech.

The word “cartoon” did not yet carry its familiar modern meaning. It referred primarily to a large preparatory drawing made for a fresco, tapestry or other monumental artwork. The British government had recently organised a competition for designs—known as cartoons—to decorate the rebuilt Houses of Parliament.

Leech borrowed the official term and turned it against the state.

While the government spent money commissioning heroic images for Parliament, poverty remained visible in the streets outside. The official artworks represented the “shadow” of national greatness. The hungry people standing before them were the neglected “substance” of British life.

The British Museum notes that the Westminster exhibition and Leech’s response indirectly produced the modern use of “cartoon” for comic and satirical drawings.  

The magazine that published the image had existed for less than two years.

Its full title was Punch, or the London Charivari.

During the following century, it would become one of the most influential humour publications in the world.

A French Name in London

Punch first appeared on 17 July 1841.

Its subtitle, “The London Charivari,” openly acknowledged the influence of Charles Philipon’s Parisian daily Le Charivari. The new magazine borrowed more than a French publishing reference. It adopted the idea that humour, illustration, commentary and current affairs could be combined within a regular periodical identity.

Yet the London publication quickly developed its own voice.

Its founders included wood engraver Ebenezer Landells and writer Henry Mayhew. Mark Lemon became its first editor and remained in the position until his death in 1870.

The publication’s early contributors moved between journalism, theatre, illustration and literature. They did not initially possess the security or prestige of an established national institution. The first issues belonged to the unstable world of inexpensive illustrated journalism, where publications could disappear after only a few months.

Its title character offered a recognisable identity.

Mr. Punch came from the traditional puppet theatre of Punch and Judy, itself descended from the Italian commedia dell’arte figure Pulcinella. With his hooked nose, pointed chin, hump and mischievous violence, Punch was not a respectable moral authority.

He was boastful, cruel, rebellious and difficult to control.

These qualities made him an effective satirical mask.

Through Mr. Punch, the publication could mock politicians and public institutions while maintaining the theatrical fiction that the criticism came from a traditional comic character rather than from a solemn political organisation.

The title also contained a verbal joke.

“Punch” referred to the puppet, but also suggested a blow delivered to the powerful. The magazine would attempt to strike public figures while making the attack appear playful.

The Magazine as a Speaking Character

Earlier satirical publications had used symbolic figures and recurring narrators, but Punch made its central character part of a remarkably consistent institutional identity.

Mr. Punch appeared on covers, in decorative borders and within the magazine’s internal language. The publication frequently wrote as though Punch himself were observing Parliament, judging public events or addressing the reader.

This gave the magazine a voice that was neither entirely journalistic nor entirely fictional.

An unsigned comment could be presented as the opinion of Mr. Punch.

A political drawing could become “Punch’s” response rather than merely the personal opinion of an individual artist.

The character united contributions from writers and illustrators whose styles differed considerably.

Over time, readers did not simply ask what John Leech, John Tenniel or another contributor thought about an event. They asked what Punch thought.

That distinction is fundamental to the institutional history of satire.

A magazine becomes more than a container when its editorial personality remains recognisable across changes in contributors, governments and generations.

An Uncertain Beginning

The later fame of Punch can make its survival appear inevitable.

It was not.

The early magazine struggled financially and had not yet found a secure audience. Its political attitudes were reformist, but its mixture of jokes, poems, short commentary and illustrations did not immediately produce a stable commercial identity.

The situation improved after the publishing firm Bradbury and Evans became involved. Their printing resources, distribution capacity and business organisation provided the magazine with a stronger material foundation.

This shift illustrates a recurring truth in the history of independent satire:

A strong editorial idea is not enough.

The publication must also be printed reliably, distributed on time, sold at a sustainable price and supported by sufficient capital to survive weak issues and legal risk.

Paris had already demonstrated that oppositional caricature required a publishing system.

London confirmed the same lesson.

Punch became influential not only because it attracted talented artists and writers, but because it gradually developed an organisation capable of sustaining their work over many decades.

The Hungry Forties

The Britain into which Punch was born was marked by severe inequality.

Industrialisation had created enormous wealth, but also overcrowded cities, dangerous labour, insecure employment and visible poverty. The early 1840s became known as the Hungry Forties, a phrase associated with food shortages, economic hardship and political unrest.

Early Punch was often more socially critical than the respectable national institution it later became.

Its pages addressed the Poor Law, factory labour, housing, hunger and the indifference of wealthy society. It mocked both government policy and the comfortable moral language through which poverty was explained as a failure of individual character.

John Leech’s Substance and Shadow emerged from this environment.

The drawing did not simply mock bad government taste.

It contrasted public spending on monumental historical art with the physical condition of people living in the present.

The humour was bitter because the contradiction was real.

The state wanted images of national greatness.

Leech showed the citizens excluded from that greatness.

How “Cartoon” Changed Meaning

The government competition that inspired Leech’s drawing concerned the decoration of the new Palace of Westminster.

The old parliamentary complex had been largely destroyed by fire in 1834. As the new Houses of Parliament were being planned, artists were invited to submit large preparatory designs for murals representing British history and literature.

These preparatory drawings were traditionally called cartoons.

When the official works were exhibited in Westminster Hall in 1843, Punch responded with a series of its own “cartoons.”

The first and most influential was Cartoon, No. 1: Substance and Shadow, published on 15 July 1843.

Leech’s title was a deliberate act of appropriation.

He took a word associated with prestigious academic art and applied it to a topical satirical image printed in a popular magazine.

The joke proved more durable than the competition it mocked.

After Punch adopted the term, “cartoon” increasingly came to mean a humorous or political drawing intended for publication.  

This linguistic change reveals how institutions shape artistic categories.

The modern meaning did not emerge from a theoretical manifesto.

It developed through repeated editorial use.

A magazine borrowed a formal art term for a joke. The joke became a publishing convention. The convention entered everyday language.

Today, the word is used internationally for editorial drawings, comic images and animated works.

Its modern history remains tied to one page in an illustrated London weekly.

John Leech and the Social World of Punch

John Leech became the defining artist of Punch’s early decades.

His political drawings addressed major public events, but his importance also came from his observation of ordinary social behaviour.

Leech drew crowded streets, family outings, railway travel, sporting life, fashion, servants, shopkeepers and the expanding urban middle class.

His figures were rarely transformed into monstrous symbolic bodies in the manner of Daumier’s Gargantua.

Instead, much of his humour emerged from situation, gesture and conversation.

A socially ambitious person might reveal insecurity through a single sentence.

A fashionable gentleman might appear ridiculous because of his clothing and posture rather than through extreme anatomical distortion.

A family outing could become a study of discomfort, class anxiety and failed respectability.

This approach helped establish a form of British social cartooning that depended on close behavioural observation.

The artist did not always need to turn the politician into an animal or object.

Sometimes the person’s own manners were sufficient.

The Big Cut

Political cartoons gradually acquired a special place within the magazine.

The large principal illustration became known as “Mr. Punch’s Big Cut.” It usually presented the publication’s major visual comment on an important event.

The expression “cut” referred to the wood-engraving block used in printing, but the phrase also implied a sharp editorial intervention.

A Big Cut differed from the smaller jokes scattered throughout the issue.

It carried institutional weight.

The image represented the magazine’s considered response to a subject of national importance. Its scale, position and visual complexity told the reader that this was not merely a passing joke.

The development of the Big Cut created a hierarchy inside the magazine.

Some drawings illustrated minor social comedy.

Others spoke with the authority of the publication as a whole.

This distinction later shaped editorial cartooning in newspapers and magazines across the world. The main political cartoon became comparable to an editorial article: a visual statement associated not only with the artist but also with the publication.

The Punch Table

The institutional identity of the magazine was reinforced by its famous editorial dinners.

Writers, editors and artists met around what became known as the Punch Table. At these weekly gatherings, contributors discussed current events, proposed ideas and helped determine the subject of the principal cartoon.

This ritual became part of the magazine’s mythology.

The table was more than furniture.

It symbolised collective authorship.

The principal cartoon might be drawn by one artist, but its subject could emerge from discussion among writers, editors and fellow illustrators. A phrase suggested during dinner might become the caption. A political analogy could be revised by several participants before reaching the page.

The Punch Table represented an editorial model in which satire was produced through conversation.

This collective process did not erase individual authorship.

John Leech or John Tenniel still brought personal drawing styles, visual judgement and political interpretation to the finished work.

But the publication’s most prominent images were often shaped inside a group culture.

The cartoon therefore belonged simultaneously to the artist and to Punch.

The rituals of belonging

The Table also marked the boundaries of the institution.

To be invited was to enter the central creative circle of one of Britain’s most influential publications. Contributors carved initials into the table, turning it into a physical record of membership and continuity.

Yet the ritual also reflected the social limits of Victorian publishing.

The central editorial world of Punch was overwhelmingly male. Its dinners reproduced the club culture of the period, in which professional authority, cultural influence and informal decision-making were concentrated within male social networks.

The same system that created solidarity and editorial consistency could exclude those who did not belong to the accepted circle.

Institutional culture always has two sides:

It gives a publication continuity.

It also determines who is permitted to participate in creating that continuity.

From Reformist Satire to National Voice

Early Punch often criticised poverty, political indifference and social injustice.

As the magazine became commercially secure and culturally prestigious, its position changed.

It increasingly spoke to and for the expanding British middle class. Its satire remained capable of criticising ministers, parties and public failures, but it became less likely to question the basic legitimacy of the social and imperial system in which its readers lived.

This was not a single moment of betrayal.

It was a gradual institutional transformation.

A small oppositional weekly had become a publication read by politicians, professionals and respectable households. Its jokes entered public conversation. Its artists acquired national reputations. Its bound volumes became part of middle-class domestic culture.

The publication no longer stood outside the establishment.

It had become one of the places where the establishment looked at itself.

This position gave Punch enormous influence.

It could embarrass a minister, define the public image of a political leader or create a phrase that entered everyday language.

But influence also produced caution.

A magazine that had become a national institution could still mock authority while sharing many of the assumptions on which that authority rested.

John Tenniel and the Authority of the Main Cartoon

John Tenniel joined Punch in 1850.

He later became best known internationally for illustrating Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Yet his central professional identity for much of his life was connected to political cartooning.

After John Leech’s death in 1864, Tenniel became the magazine’s principal political cartoonist. The Victoria and Albert Museum identifies 1864 as the year he assumed the position of Principal Cartoonist at Punch.  

Tenniel’s drawings differed from Leech’s lighter social observation.

They often possessed the structure and seriousness of history painting.

Political leaders appeared as figures from Shakespeare, classical mythology, medieval legend or the Bible. Nations became heroic women, warriors, animals or allegorical bodies.

His compositions were controlled and monumental.

The line was clear.

Figures occupied the page with theatrical authority.

The result helped make Punch’s main cartoon look like an official image of political interpretation.

Even when the work mocked a minister, it could retain the visual dignity of academic art.

This was a striking contradiction.

The magazine had helped redefine “cartoon” by mocking the pretensions of monumental painting. Tenniel then used the visual authority of monumental painting to elevate the political cartoon.

Politics as Theatre

Tenniel approached political life as a stage filled with recognisable roles.

Britannia represented the nation.

The British lion embodied courage and imperial power.

Prime ministers became statesmen, actors, magicians or mythological figures.

Foreign powers could be represented as bears, eagles or personified national characters.

This visual vocabulary allowed complicated political events to be condensed into familiar stories.

A diplomatic dispute could become a duel.

An election could become a race.

A military crisis could appear as a storm threatening a ship.

Parliamentary manoeuvring could be represented as a theatrical performance.

The reader did not need to understand every administrative detail.

The allegory supplied an emotional structure.

Someone was brave.

Someone was deceptive.

Someone was in danger.

Someone had lost control.

This method gave political cartooning clarity and power.

It also simplified history.

Nations appeared as unified individuals even when their populations were deeply divided. Imperial conflicts became dramatic contests between symbolic figures, while the lives of colonised people could disappear from view.

The allegory explained politics by reducing it.

What it clarified in one direction, it concealed in another.

Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone

Victorian political rivalry provided Punch with recurring protagonists.

Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone were among the most frequently represented political figures of the period.

Their contrasting appearances and public personalities offered cartoonists strong material.

Disraeli could be presented as theatrical, exotic, calculating or imaginative.

Gladstone could appear earnest, moralistic, intense or obsessive.

Repeated publication turned these personal characteristics into durable public identities.

Readers encountered political leaders not only through speeches and newspaper reports but through the visual personalities constructed by Punch.

This is one of the magazine’s most important historical functions.

A political cartoon does not merely respond to an already established reputation.

By repeating certain features, it helps create that reputation.

A long nose, raised eyebrow, unusual hairstyle or habitual pose can gradually become a visual summary of a political career.

The drawing begins as commentary.

Through repetition, it becomes memory.

Britannia and the British Lion

Punch did not invent Britannia or the British lion.

It helped standardise their modern political use.

Britannia, usually shown as a helmeted female figure with shield and trident, could express the dignity, anxiety or moral authority of the nation. The lion represented British strength, courage and imperial confidence.

These symbols allowed the magazine to speak about Britain as though it were a single body with a single personality.

A government might make a mistake, but Britannia could remain noble.

A minister might be weak, but the lion could still represent national power.

This separation gave the magazine a flexible political language.

It could criticise particular leaders while preserving the larger idea of national greatness.

The state, government and nation were not treated as identical.

The politician could fail Britain.

Britain itself remained the higher moral figure.

This visual structure helped Punch become critical without becoming revolutionary.

It disciplined political disagreement within patriotic symbolism.

The Crimean War

The Crimean War gave Punch an opportunity to combine patriotism with criticism.

The magazine supported British soldiers and could celebrate courage, yet it also attacked administrative failure, inadequate supplies and political incompetence.

John Leech’s wartime drawings contributed to the public image of the ordinary British soldier as brave, patient and betrayed by distant authorities.

This distinction became a lasting pattern in British wartime satire:

The soldier is honoured.

The officials who manage the war are mocked.

The nation’s moral identity is preserved by placing responsibility for failure on ministers, commanders or bureaucracy.

Such cartoons could expose real suffering and mismanagement.

At the same time, they could protect the larger imperial project from deeper criticism.

War might be represented as badly organised without being questioned as a political enterprise.

The drawing could attack the conduct of power while leaving its underlying assumptions intact.

The American Civil War and a British Audience

Punch’s response to the American Civil War reflected the complexity and inconsistency of its editorial position.

Different moments in the conflict produced sympathy, criticism and uncertainty. The magazine’s depictions of Abraham Lincoln evolved over time. Earlier caricatures could present him as awkward, primitive or physically grotesque. After his assassination in 1865, Tenniel’s “Abraham Lincoln: The Last Appeal” and the accompanying response treated him with far greater dignity.

This shift shows that a satirical publication does not possess a single permanent judgement.

Its visual politics can change as events unfold, public opinion shifts and historical meaning becomes clearer.

Yet later admiration does not erase earlier representation.

The archive preserves both.

This is why bound magazines are historically valuable. They prevent institutions from remembering only the moments that later appear honourable.

Ireland and the Limits of Sympathy

Punch’s treatment of Ireland exposes some of the darkest limitations of Victorian British satire.

Irish political figures and ordinary Irish people were frequently represented through stereotypes that suggested violence, drunkenness, primitiveness or racial inferiority. In some images, Irish characters were made to appear simian or less fully human.

These drawings did not merely criticise specific political movements.

They participated in a broader visual culture that presented Irish resistance as irrational and British control as necessary.

The distinction between political satire and racial caricature collapsed.

A publication that could show compassion toward poverty in London could deny individuality to people living under British rule.

This contradiction is essential to understanding Punch.

The magazine’s liberalism was often bounded by nationality, empire and class.

It could defend reform within Britain while supporting or normalising unequal relationships beyond the centre of British political life.

The archive therefore records more than the development of cartooning.

It records the limits of Victorian sympathy.

Empire as Common Sense

At the height of British imperial power, Punch helped turn empire into a familiar visual world.

Colonised territories appeared as symbolic figures, exotic costumes or childlike populations. Britain could be shown as guardian, teacher, policeman or civilising force.

Such imagery converted political domination into a moral relationship.

Empire became a burden carried by Britain, a duty performed for supposedly less developed peoples or a natural extension of national strength.

The violence, extraction and resistance underlying imperial rule could disappear behind allegory.

Britannia stood upright.

The colonised subject knelt, followed or required instruction.

These compositions did not need explicit arguments.

The arrangement of bodies made the hierarchy appear natural.

This is one reason visual satire must be studied critically.

The cartoon can expose ideology.

It can also make ideology feel like common sense.

Gender and the Respectable Reader

Women appeared frequently in Punch, but the central editorial institution remained largely male.

Female figures could represent the nation, beauty, domestic authority, fashion or social anxiety. Yet real women’s political demands were often viewed through the assumptions of male middle-class readership.

The campaign for women’s suffrage provided a revealing example.

Some cartoons engaged seriously with political arguments, while others reduced campaigners to stereotypes of masculine, unattractive or socially disruptive women.

The humour often depended on the belief that political participation violated proper femininity.

The magazine that used Britannia as a noble symbol of national authority could still treat actual women seeking authority as comic or threatening.

Again, the contradiction is instructive.

Symbolic femininity could be honoured.

Female political agency could be mocked.

Social Comedy and the Middle-Class Mirror

Political cartoons gave Punch national influence, but social comedy helped secure its weekly readership.

Artists such as Charles Keene, George du Maurier, Linley Sambourne and later Phil May observed the behaviour of domestic and urban life.

The magazine’s pages became populated by:

• ambitious hosts,
• uncomfortable guests,
• fashionable young people,
• servants who understood more than their employers,
• artists seeking status,
• families on holiday,
• men pretending to possess knowledge,
• and respectable people failing to control ordinary situations.

These cartoons offered readers the pleasure of recognition.

The target was often not a distant king or minister.

It was someone encountered at dinner, at the railway station, in the drawing room or perhaps in the mirror.

The humour depended on shared codes.

Readers needed to understand accents, clothing, etiquette, class position and the emotional risks of social embarrassment.

This gave the cartoons precision.

It also limited their accessibility.

A joke built on Victorian class manners might be immediately clear to the original audience and almost invisible to later readers.

George du Maurier and the Anxiety of Taste

George du Maurier became particularly associated with the social world of the late Victorian middle and upper classes.

His drawings addressed art, music, fashion, marriage, social ambition and the fear of appearing culturally ignorant.

Characters often performed sophistication.

They attended exhibitions, discussed literature or attempted to use fashionable language. The humour emerged when the performance failed.

Du Maurier understood that cultural status depends not only on wealth but on appearing to possess correct taste.

A person might own paintings and still misunderstand art.

A host might invite intellectual guests and reveal insecurity through conversation.

A family might adopt modern fashions without understanding the values associated with them.

These scenes turned the drawing room into a political space of another kind.

Power operated through manners, education and cultural confidence.

The characters were rarely imprisoned or censored.

They were controlled by the fear of embarrassment.

Linley Sambourne and the Dense Political Page

Linley Sambourne brought remarkable technical detail to Punch.

His principal cartoons often contained carefully researched costumes, objects, architecture and symbolic references. He used photography as a visual aid, sometimes staging poses and collecting images to construct convincing figures.

The result could resemble an elaborate historical illustration.

Yet the image remained connected to immediate political events.

Sambourne’s work reveals the labour hidden behind the apparently spontaneous editorial cartoon.

The finished drawing may respond to a weekly event.

Its production can require research, reference materials, compositional planning and technical engraving knowledge.

Topical speed does not necessarily mean visual simplicity.

The nineteenth-century cartoonist worked within strict deadlines, but the page could still become an extraordinarily dense designed object.

Phil May and the Economy of the Line

By contrast, Phil May demonstrated the power of reduction.

His drawings often relied on fewer lines, strong silhouettes and an ability to capture posture with great economy. Instead of filling the page with elaborate cross-hatching and symbolic detail, May could make a character convincing through a bent knee, tilted hat or carefully observed expression.

This simplification pointed towards the modern cartoon line.

As printing technologies and magazine layouts changed, the ability to communicate quickly became increasingly valuable.

The drawing no longer needed to imitate the density of engraving or academic illustration.

A few lines could create class, mood and personality.

The history of Punch therefore contains two parallel tendencies:

The monumental, allegorical and highly finished political composition.

The quick, observational and economical social drawing.

Modern magazine cartooning inherited both.

Humour Without Revolution

Punch’s success rested partly on its ability to criticise without making the reader feel that the whole social order must be destroyed.

Politicians were foolish.

Bureaucrats were incompetent.

Fashion was absurd.

The rich could be selfish.

The poor could be neglected.

Yet the nation, monarchy and constitutional system usually remained recoverable.

The problem was often presented as bad behaviour within an essentially valid structure.

This position made the magazine safe enough for respectable readership while preserving the pleasure of irreverence.

The reader could laugh at authority without abandoning loyalty to the institutions represented.

Such humour performs a stabilising function.

It releases frustration.

It allows criticism.

It can encourage reform.

But it may also protect the system by presenting its failures as correctable mistakes rather than structural conditions.

Punch was powerful because it stood close enough to authority to be heard and far enough away to mock it.

Over time, that distance became increasingly difficult to measure.

From Satirical Outsider to British Institution

By the late nineteenth century, Punch was no longer merely one humour magazine among many.

Its cartoons were discussed in political life, reproduced elsewhere and treated as part of the national record. Its artists became famous. Its language entered ordinary speech. Its annual bound volumes preserved a visual chronology of British public life.

The title “The London Charivari” remained, but the publication had moved far from its French inspiration.

It had created a specifically British model of institutional satire:

Weekly rather than revolutionary.

Collective rather than dependent on one artist.

Patriotic but capable of criticism.

Respectable while retaining the mask of irreverence.

This model influenced publications far beyond Britain.

The name Punch was adopted or adapted by satirical journals in India, Japan, Egypt, the Ottoman world and other regions. Some imitated its format and symbolism. Others used the prestige of its name to criticise British power or local elites.

The magazine had become both a publication and an international template.

The Cost of Longevity

Long life is often treated as proof of success.

It can also create inertia.

A publication that survives for generations accumulates traditions, recurring joke structures and assumptions about its reader. These habits provide identity, but they can gradually become barriers to renewal.

The weekly rituals that once produced coherence may produce predictability.

The symbolic language that once made politics clear may become detached from changing social realities.

The respectable audience that provides financial security may discourage more disruptive criticism.

Punch survived major political transformations, wars and changes in media technology. It ceased publication in 1992, was revived in 1996 and closed again in 2002.

Its long history does not form a single unbroken editorial personality.

Different periods possessed different strengths, blind spots and degrees of cultural influence.

Yet the magazine’s deepest legacy was established early.

It demonstrated that political and social cartooning could be organised as a permanent editorial institution.

What Punch Changed

Punch did not invent political caricature.

It did not create illustrated satire from nothing.

Its title openly acknowledged the earlier French model.

Its achievement lay elsewhere.

It gave the cartoon a durable institutional home.

It established a recognisable editorial character through Mr. Punch.

It created collective decision-making rituals around the Punch Table.

It turned the principal political drawing into a visual editorial.

It helped transform “cartoon” from a term for preparatory art into the modern name of a satirical drawing.

It developed national symbols that could interpret politics quickly.

It combined high political allegory with close observation of everyday social behaviour.

And through its contradictions, it documented the limits of liberal Victorian Britain.

The same magazine could defend poor children and reproduce imperial hierarchy.

It could mock ministers while strengthening national mythology.

It could challenge individual authority while becoming an authority itself.

These contradictions are not secondary to its history.

They are the reason its archive remains so valuable.

Punch shows that satire does not stand outside society as a pure force of truth.

It is produced inside institutions, markets, social classes and political cultures.

It can see certain injustices with extraordinary clarity while remaining blind to others.

From British Respectability to German Graphic Rebellion

By the end of the nineteenth century, Punch represented the successful institutionalisation of illustrated humour.

Its weekly form was established.

Its social position was secure.

Its symbolic language was widely understood.

But this success also made it appear respectable, controlled and increasingly connected to the world it mocked.

In Munich, a younger publication would adopt a very different visual identity.

It would reject the crowded appearance of traditional illustrated journals in favour of bold colour, sharp silhouettes and modern page design.

Its emblem would not be a comic puppet seated within the national establishment.

It would be a red bulldog breaking its chain.

The magazine was called Simplicissimus.

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The Global Memory of the Line – 1  | The Birth of Modern Cartoon Journalism in Paris

The Global Memory of the Line – 3