Look For It In The Funny Papers

-

It’s been said that in fascist societies, or in ones that are heading speedily toward fascism, the best critical discourse you can find on the social and political hot buttons of the day will be in the funny papers, not the front page news. We’re in a moment like this today, I believe. Artists like Joe Sacco, Ari Folman, Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi are offering some of the most humanizing and probing topical inquiries around, while “real” journalism is sounding as jingoistic as our warring policy-makers.

In 1963, Ernst Gombrich wrote that one of the strengths of the cartoon format is the "flash of pleasant insight" it can offer at having made the unfamiliar clear in an instant. But he also reminds that this flash is really “the illusion of an explanation while really the analogy is rather incomplete." So to with political analysis in the mainstream news - though it's staged to inform, whenever a shorthand formula is applied to very nuanced and complex relationships, the semantic products become a minefield of abstractions and incomplete systems (never mind the hand of the advertisers and other stakeholders shaping the essential content). Back in the day of the British Empire, one of the most pervasive and popular tools of the Indian nationalist message in the early years of its crystallization was the newspaper cartoon. In particular, the cartoons from the satirical weekly The Hindi Punch from 1904 chronicled the popular debate on the changing imperial map and India’s stakes therein, while maintaining a safe distance, via seemingly innocuous humor, from the long arm of Britain’s surveillance and censorship. These cartoons lived and operated under the radar of serious social criticism, but carried with them a measure of reformist currency that only becomes clearer in historical retrospect.

“The Sentinel,” published in April 1904, disposed a subtle, abstruse symbolic treatment of Tibet and India’s conjoined relationship in the imperialist stance, but condensed and made instantaneously digestable the connections between imperialism abroad and imperialism at home. 1903-1904 was a crucial year’s turn on the British imperial stage - it witnessed the Younghusband ‘Expedition’ to Tibet, the third time India would bear the financial brunt of an expansionist British colonial project (Indian taxpayers had also funded incursions in Afghanistan and Burma earlier in the century). The cartoon was drawn in response to a recent public address by the British Viceroy on reviewing the last five years of his colonial administration; a type of State of the Union delivered from the executive seat of British India.

The Sentinel standing astride the geographic bounds of the British Empire is pictured here as an Indian sepoy. At attention with rifle resting on his back shoulder, the front hand is outstretched and disproportionately enlarged, detached in scale from the rest of the body, fingers hovering above and marking exactly in their span the east and west sides of the northern borders of India and Tibet. The disembodied, out-of-context hand signaled the discorporate and excessive forces of imperialism. The Sentinel is cast as a passive and virtual enabler of events, engendering very little in the way of direct action, but inflecting a certain tone on the reluctant role he plays in Anglo-Tibetan affairs. The message is intangible but still palpable; its language is equally bound up by the didacticism of cartoon shorthand, and the ambiguity and tenuousness of the analogy it seeks to make, but cannot quite spell out.