A comparative study of the Boer War conveyed in the 1901 political cartoons of Edward Linley Sambourne in Punch and Jean Veber in L’Assiette au Beurre.

Political cartoons as headline representation are in effect a combination of artisticlicence and a critical version of the truth. Linley Sambourne and Jean Veber’s 1901 cartoonson the Boer War for Punch and L’Assiette au Beurre create tensions and dialectic not only onBritish and French feeling about foreign policy in South Africa and at home, but also indicatefine points on each publication’s editorial remit. This comparative study is a mirroringsynthesis of these approaches that sets the Boer War forty five cartoons in context.Whereas Punch’s cartoons are set within a text layout and L’Assiette’s are the textthemselves, both transmit set ideas on The Boer War as ‘sight bite’ news and opinion pieces.Veber’s cartoons offered swift knee-jerk reactions against the ruling elite and the horrors ofBritish cruelty toward Boer prisoners as coverage of the war escalated in 1901. His extremecapturing of the zeitgeist followed the magazine’s editorial bent, but they also reflected hisbrave counter-hegemonic stance towards a French government seeking an alliance with itsBritish counterpart. With this in mind, Antonio Gramsci’s theory on hegemony as applied tojournalism allows the scholar to look at the media from a cultural perspective. This focus isused to show cartoons as representative of conflicts in the fight for power, but this timepublicly conveyed to the readership. Thus, types of truth enhancements in each set of cartoonsindicate the cartoonists’ respective entrenchment with, or detachment from, Imperialinstitutions, thereby signalling emerging attempts of the attitudinal persuasion of the readertoward Punch or L’Assiette’s political leanings.The inclusion of political cartoons in editorial pages was part of the cult of visualattention-grabbing news values that had become professionalised, industrialised andpopularised by the early Twentieth Century. Cartoons can be decoded using Ernst Gombrich’ssix-point filter in order to identify the cartoonist’s method of compressing messages about people and events. A publication’s politics are reflected in the telescoping of exaggeratedopinions – an effective way to pass on an authoritatively saturated message to the readership.Gombrich recognised the power of conveying messages to the audience through seeminglyincongruous placement of figures in odd situations within cartoons. His methodology acts asvisual shorthand for images designed to elicit a desired response to a reported situation as thepublication saw it. In the context of the history of journalism, his psychologically analyticalapproach is appropriate in the appreciation of cartoons’ extremes, often made more acute bythe partisan politics of war.