Rudolph Arnheim says that no matter how clumsy a person is as a draftsman, he is already an iconic producer thanks to his bodily equipment and his socialization process.

This capacity of being innate iconic producers gives us the possibility of transforming the visible, concrete world in order to access, through metaphor or allegory, the conceptual expression of abstract thought. This, which seems very obvious, is especially relevant when reviewing political cartoons or comics. For example, it is well known that the deformation of the physical features of the character in political cartoons is the metaphor of a morality that is also counterfeit. That exaggeration is satire that leads to mockery and is, perhaps, according to some, a form of revenge or exorcism against the abuses of institutionalized power.

Comic characters also contain values, stereotypes, and ideologies in their drawn physiques and, above all, in their actions.

In 1890, the Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer wrote The Golden Bough. In his book, he tries to unravel some of the mechanisms that govern religions and magical thinking; two of his fundamental postulates in studying these systems are that similarity replicates the object and that things that were once together will continue to influence each other once separated. We can say that this is the basis not only of religious and magical thinking but also of the artistic expressions of all times.

From the cave paintings of Altamira to The Yellow Kid and from the voodoo doll to modern political cartoons, all are manifestations of this magical quality of the image. That is why a politician with low self-esteem feels offended by a caricature of himself appearing in a newspaper; that is why you keep in your wallet the picture of your beloved. The iconic image is the materialization of an absence; it is a recomposition of matter impregnated with the same affective and spiritual vibrations as its real counterpart.

To think about caricature in the evolution of art points to a continuous transformation that gradually moves away from mimesis, that is, the intention of representing the world “as nature shows it to us”; this subject can shed some light when we follow the trail to the birth of political cartoons.

For authors such as Wilhelm Worringer, German art historian and theorist and author of the book “Abstraction and Nature,” the path from the geometric abstract to the naturalistic organic is the path to be followed by the arts in pursuit of a “sentimental projection” of an absolute artistic will. According to him, a confused and meditative spiritual state cannot redeem objects through their organic beauty; the human being, faced with phenomenal and climatic diversity, had to control his environment by trapping it in geometric forms. On the other hand, the cultures that danced to the rhythm of the universal order, those whose existence was harmonious with the environment and where a spiritual vocation of immanence dominated, were the authors of very different plastic expressions. A remarkable example is the Greeks.

For Ernest Gombrich, the Greeks had overcome the discomfort of being vulnerable to the arbitrariness of natural phenomena; their mythological imagination was not only ordered and systematized but also subjected to the human figure. The logos was imposed on the myth; in the arts, they began to seek compositions that moved the senses and elevated themselves above nature. Hellenism and the Renaissance were periods of the rise of naturalism.

It is interesting to note that “non-Western cultures” with markedly transcendentalist religions invented polymorphic or zoomorphic beings, while the Greeks, with rationalist conceptions, gave their gods, on the contrary, an exalted human beauty.

An approach to what could be called caricature from our time, during classical antiquity, comes to us as the legend of the Greek painter Zeuxis, who died of laughter while making a grotesque portrait of an old woman.

In 15th-century Rome we can also find in the Domus Aurea, built by Nero, decorative motifs portraying mythological beings and absurd and fantastic scenes; it was called grotesque painting.

Our tracing of caricatures or satirical drawings takes us back to the Middle Ages. At that time the mimetic eagerness was denied to stylize the line in the Gothic; then was born the Milanese cathedral of Il Duomo, the Sevillian giant of Mudejar influence, and Notre Dame with its gargoyles always in vigil. This was also the age of religious obscurantism, scholasticism, the empire of the devil, the Black Plague, and corruption anointed with Eucharistic wine, and it was also the time when pigs, wolves, and foxes frolicked in the margins of manuscripts illuminated by the word of God.

Following Worringer's thought, in the Middle Ages, the plastic expressions, particularly the Gothic, were dominated by a mixture of rational naturalism and spiritual, or “magical geometris”m. It is a vivification of the inorganic; the “sentimental projection” is achieved on the mechanical values of the corporeal, giving them movement despite their inanimate condition. Worringer pays more attention to architecture in his reflections; however, he gives a key role to ornamentation in the definition of aesthetic categories. This is especially important because it is here where the features of the satirical drawing and the drawings that some centuries later will be associated with the cartoon are outlined.

From this date are the anthropomorphic animals that appeared either playing drums or pulling their tails on the pages of missals or chant books; some are mere amusements, allegories that innocently stimulate the imagination, or that, some say, had the function of keeping the faithful awake during the liturgy. Others, however, are openly sarcastic, drawings that mocked the entire clerical guild.

The fox, the donkey, the pig, and the cat began to portray the corrupt nature of the priests. Thus, inheriting the Greco-Roman fabulous tradition of Phaedrus and Aesop, the pigs wore the habit, the donkeys drank wine, and through the fox's snout, the Word manifested itself.

Although these drawings were not exactly caricatures, we can already distinguish the satirical manufacture in the intention. It is then when the social exchange and power relations are reflected in the graphic expressions, without totally leaving aside some mythological and fantastic features. Criticism and mockery through these drawings were directed at the holders of power: the Catholic hierarchy.

In the Middle Ages an expression that we will see developed from the Renaissance onwards and flourished during the Reformation was born: the political caricature (or political cartoon).

The works of social criticism that centuries later would sign Hogarth, Goya, and Daumier had their germ in the mockery of the laymen to the clergy.

One of the most outstanding artists was Lukas Granach, who made engravings that deal with mundane subjects but have not yet shed their fantastic, mythical, bestiary-like character.

The Reformation is a good time for caricature portraiture, with the Carracci brothers being one of its important exponents; DaVinci had done it before in the Renaissance.

The important thing is that the copy of nature as the supreme goal of art had been surpassed; caricature began to carry other aesthetic criteria. The artist was no longer a simple imitator; he added value, a creative breath of psychic life, to those images that arose in his mind.

The caricature portrait and the political caricature, as we were saying, are heirs to the magical quality of the image; once the magical double was mastered, once the independence between the lines on the surface and their real counterpart was assured, the artist went from witchcraft to drawing political caricature.

Political caricature is a “Western” phenomenon, at least in origin; its consolidation as a means of social contestation can be traced back to the 18th century in France and England, driven by shattering political events such as the French Revolution (1789), the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), or the currents of the Romantic movement that gave wings to the oneiric, lyricism, and fantasy.

Hogarth, Gillray, Rowlandson, and many others drew humorous prints with great success in George III's England; however, during the Victorian era, a period characterized by moralism, prohibitions, and censorship, the caricature center of the world moved to France. The French Revolution did not begin with the armed struggle but with the ideological one, on the battlefield of caricature, where republicans, royalists, and the clergy were all at each other's throats, deploying their arsenal of satirical engravings. Prints gradually gave way to newspapers and magazines such as La Caricature (1830), Le Charivari (1832), and Le Journal Pour Rire (1848), and in their pages found a place for the works of Daumier, Philipon, Monnier, Doré, etc.

In La Caricature, by the way, one of the most famous sequences in the history of political caricature took place. This was a magazine launched in Paris in 1830, anti-monarchist, where, as we have said, artists of the stature of Daumier collaborated. In it the institutional power was spoliated. The king, Louis-Philippe I, was the constant target of his mockery, which often brought Philipon to court. One day, in the middle of an audience, and knowing that he had lost, he didactically used his drawings to illustrate that the king was easily caricatured and that caricaturists were not to blame, then Philipon, in full view of everyone, transformed the king into a pear (it is worth mentioning that poire, pear, in French colloquially means “fool,” so the metaphor went beyond the mere drawing).

“Let's see,” he said, “for which of these drawings in the process I'm going to be condemned.” Little jokes like that cost him 6 months in jail and a fine of 2,000 francs, but that did not prevent him from later asking his friend and collaborator Honoré Daumier to reproduce the sequence in the pages of La Caricature. Le Poire became a very famous caricature, already part of the history of political caricature, and at the time, the people of the street adopted it, filling the walls of Paris with drawings of pears and making an insignificant fruit a symbol of popular discontent.

There was a moment in history when satirical drawings and drawn sequences combined and crossed each other; that moment occurred in the 18th century in France and England. While it is true that Richard Felton can be considered the father of modern comics, there were authors who made social satire through genre scenes and began to experiment with a sequentialized language, similar to the little squares of comics. One of those notable characters in the English scene was William Hogarth. Although the vast majority of his works are paintings and not engravings or drawings, he was able to tell stories that reflected the morals and spirit of the time, although he also had to capture terrible images such as “Gin Line,” an engraving that denounced the effects of gin consumption.

William Hogarth's work has led him to be considered one of the grandfathers of comics and, at the same time, the father of political cartoons—the father of political cartoons in their most essential sense, because Hogarth believed that his work could and should be an instrument of reflection and social change.

The English and later American cartoonists have established themselves as the champions of contemporary political cartooning; a testament to this is the long life of perhaps the most famous satirical magazine of all time. Punch Magazine. Founded in 1841 by Henry Mayhew, it closed in 1992 only to be resurrected for a brief period by tycoon Mohamed al Fayed, the father of Dodi al Fayed, the man who died with Princess Diana. The magazine closed definitively in 2002, being a showcase where the history of caricature could be seen passing through great artists such as John Leech or James Gillray.

Since then, satirical magazines have multiplied around the world; in some of them, political cartoons and comics coexist. As we have seen, at a certain point in their evolution, their differentiation between political cartoons and comics becomes unclear, but there is no doubt that they share the same magical origin of the image. Today we are clear about their differentiation, their evolutionary and artistic particularities.