Comic Empires: Imperialism in Cartoons, Caricature and Comic Art ed. by Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava (review)

Reviewed by: Comic Empires: Imperialism in Cartoons, Caricature and Comic Art ed. by Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava Brian Maidment (bio) Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava, eds., Comic Empires: Imperialism in Cartoons, Caricature and Comic Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2020), pp. xxii + 430, $130.00/£85.00 cloth, $44.95/£30.00 paperback. The fourteen substantial chapters that form Comic Empires range across several continents; nations as varied as China, Cyprus, Cuba, the United States, and Germany; and diverse graphic traditions. Arising from a continuing project led by Richard Scully, "The Cartoon Empire: The Anglo-American Tradition of Political Satire and Comic Art, 1720–2020," this volume focuses largely on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The political cartoon developed "the global reach of British-style humour magazines" at this time, thus forming "a fundamental driver of the art form in the nineteenth century" (11). But if it was "in the context of a rapidly expanding British Empire that the cartoon came into its own," the developing transnational traditions of graphic humour, the editors suggest, could both vigorously oppose or, more subtly, reinforce the imperial project regardless of specific geographical locale (11). Far from always being a democratic form "inimical to tyranny," cartoons, the editors and many of their contributors argue, also "supported and sustained forms of inequality and imperialism" (10). The book's tripartite organisation reflects these varied potentialities with chapters grouped to explore "high imperialism and colonialism" (part 1), "the critique of empire and the context of decolonisation" (part 2), and "ambiguities of empire" (part 3). For those primarily interested in Victorian periodicals, the first group of chapters will prove most rewarding, although the book's wide, transnational historical sweep is one of its many virtues. Only those chapters on Victorian topics are considered in detail below. "High Imperialism and Colonialism" comprises four chapters that bring new methodological and theoretical sophistication to analysis of cartoons from relatively well-known magazines—Punch, Puck, and Harper's Weekly, for example—and drawn by artists of the stature of Linley Sambourne, Louis Dalrymple, and Thomas Nast. Robert Dingley and Richard Scully's argument in "Courting the Colonies" centres on the use of visual allegory as a mechanism for exploring international relationships in the 1880s and 1890s. If it is hardly a revelation that "the imperial project frequently figures in the western imaginary as a form of sexual conquest," Dingley and Scully, using new sources, suggest that Linley Sambourne's Punch cartoons "are distinctively imbued with a degree of erotic suggestiveness which exceeds their function as allegory," thus exposing the hidden agendas underlying the more manifest ideologies of imperialism (49). In "'Master Jonathan' in Cuba," Albert D. Pionke and Frederick Whiting [End Page 312] also focus on Punch by aligning cartoons concerning U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba in the 1850s and 1860s with an ambitious model of the Bildungsroman drawn from literary theory. Using key terms essential to the Bildungsroman—youth, mastery, self-realisation, socialization—the authors use Punch cartoons as a mechanism for analysing "America's status as the problematical youth among the world's superpowers" (76). Stephen Tuffnell uses three major American illustrated journals, Puck, Judge, and Life, to prise apart the complexities of 1890s Anglo-American inter-imperialism, in which assertive American economic nationalism was nonetheless tempered by a recognition that "John Bull and Uncle Sam were also collaborative partners in the quest for global leadership" (93). Finding a flexible iconographical and allegorical vocabulary that could accommodate and reconcile such diverse national ambitions was a major task for cartoonists, especially given the presence of a significant strand of anti-imperial and anti-expansionist opinion, frequently expressed as Anglophobic sentiments. If "British caricatures provided a visual shorthand for the American public to understand domestic political problems," a localised graphic vocabulary emerged that was flexible and ambivalent enough to chart America's transformation into a major international power (127). Fiona Halloran argues that "cartooning might even reveal connections between commentary on the West as imperial space and commentary on race and conquest in broader terms" in her chapter on Thomas Nast and the colonisation of the American West (135). She charts Nast's outspoken defence of marginalised and...

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