This post examines some aspects of the British diachronic illustrative tradition in connection with Talbot's Alice in Sunderland (2007). In this post, James Baker argues how what binds together the bugaboos of Talbot, Tenniel and the Georgian satirists is..

Baker, James

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20/04/2012 The English Bugaboo – Cruikshank to Talbot | The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship | Jam…1/6www.comicsgrid.com/2011/07/cruikshank-talbot/The Comics GridJournal of Comics ScholarshipISSN 2048-0792Contact us.Subscribe to our newsletter.Subscribe to our feedSponsor The Comics Grid and Your Logosand Links Go Here.The Comics Grid is archived byThis is The Comics Grid's QR code or 2D-barcode. It contains the address of ourmobile site. If your mobile phone, computeror tablet has a barcode reader, simply snapthis bar code with the camera and launchthe site.Articles by ContributorJeff Albertson (1)About Digital First Meta Grid Contribute Donate Links Banner Enter keywords here  SearchThe English Bugaboo – Cruikshank toTalbotBY J AM ES BAKER   ON J ULY 2 5 TH,  2 0 1 1  ,   3  COM M ENTS  Talbot B. (2007) Alice in Sunderland (London: Jonathan Cape, p. 295)Alice in Sunderland, Bryan Talbot‘s 2007 graphic novel, presents a disconcerting commentaryon poverty and xenophobia in modern Britain where immigration is the imagined Other, thebugaboo against which communities define themselves.  Talbot gives this bugaboo – ‘a fanciedobject of terror; a bogy; a bugbear’ 1 – visual form in a conscious authorial reference to JohnTenniel’s illustration to “The Jabberwocky“, the nonsense poem Alice reads in Lewis Carroll’sThrough the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).20/04/2012 The English Bugaboo – Cruikshank to Talbot | The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship | Jam…2/6www.comicsgrid.com/2011/07/cruikshank-talbot/James Baker (4)Roberto Bartual (7)Casey Brienza (1)Tiago Canário (1)Esther Claudio (6)Jason Dittmer (1)Christophe Dony (1)Kathleen Dunley (9)Jonathan Evans (1)Emily Goodhand (1)The Grid (17)Michael Hill (7)Nicolas Labarre (6)Gabriela Mejan (1)Nina Mickwitz (3)Renata Pascoal (1)Nicolas Pillai (1)Jesse Prevoo (1)Ernesto Priego (13)Pepo Pérez (1)Jacques Samson (1)Greice Schneider (6)Janine Utell (2)Tony Venezia (7)Peter Wilkins (1)On MendeleyOn TwitterThe Comics GridComicsGridJoin the conversationAs both Talbot’s bugaboo and Tenniel’s Jabberwocky contribute to a lineage of bugaboostraceable to Georgian graphic satire, this essay will examine some aspects of this Britishdiachronic illustrative tradition. In what follows I shall contend that a particular theme whichbinds together the bugaboos of Talbot, Tenniel and the Georgian satirists is how they speak tothe idea of foreign threat. 2Having stumbled across AiS at The Cartoon Museum, London, I was drawn to how Talbot’sbugaboo lovingly captures every dreamlike gothic detail of the Jabberwocky; retaining theverses “jaws that bite […] claws that catch!”, twisted and elongated neck, hide of scales, andthree-buttoned waistcoat. Emblazoned across this waistcoat we find ‘THE OTHER’, yet Talbot’sbugaboo is not a universal Other rather one constructed by political parties on the extremeright who, we read, ‘ruthlessly take advantage of ordinary people’s natural anxiety, cranked upto fever pitch by the tabloids, to spread blatant lies and gross exaggeration, appealing to thelowest human instinct…intolerance of The Other’.For a scholar of Georgian communication (like me), such management of popularconsciousness recalls the pamphlet war surrounding Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791),and the censorship trials brought by the government against William Hone in 1817. Moreover itrecalls Linda Colley’s seminal Britons (1992), which posited that from the eighteenth centuryonwards external threat and extra-national referents constructed the British national character. Three manifestations of this statement emerge from page 295 of AiS and provide potentialtools for studying the diachronic bugaboo.  First, those who construct Others/bugaboos bylegitimising prejudice can also be themselves considered as Others/bugaboos (see panel 2). Cruikshank I., The French Bugaboo Frightening the Royal Commanders (14 April 1797, SW Fores) BM 9005 271 x 499" © The Trustees of the British Museum. These themes are certainly observable in Georgian bugaboos. Reading back from Talbot andTenniel we may expect the bugaboo in Cruikshank’s The French Bugaboo Frightening theRoyal Commanders to be the roaring and scaled beast dominating the design. However forCruikshank the national bugaboo is ‘BUONAPARTE’, the archetypal bonnet-rougerevolutionary – emaciated (see the ridiculous girth of his boots), ragged, and manic. Napoleonreaches beyond the ordinary by taming a rampaging steed overcoming European Christianityand symbols of monarchy whilst exhaling an army of soldiers, canons, and demons. “Vive laliberté” these fog shrouded apparitions cry, driving away in terror the hapless ArchdukeCharles and Duke of York. 3.For Richard Newton, threat and foreignness are found in George III, the monstrous andreactionary steed whose wide, bulging eyes provide a visual foci. By the 1790s the King hadlargely shaken off anti-Hanoverian ire, but his proclamation of 21 May 1792 against seditiouswritings drafted by his Prime Minister (and here rider) William Pitt the Younger, bestowed backto George his hereditary un-English aura in the eyes of many radical commentators 4The bugaboo is then a powerful diachronic satiric device, articulating grand narratives of fear,xenophobia and Otherness. Yet I suspect the more inquisitive reader will find this reading tooblunt and too simplistic. You may ask what of the cowardly (and uncaricatured) commandersfleeing in Cruikshank’s design? How does the ridiculous sartorial and biological jumble that isTenniel’s bugaboo reflect the nonsense of its literary source? And to what extent does Talbotask his reader to marginalise those who construct bugaboos? Such ambiguities surround mostbugaboos, and can be fruitfully analysed by deploying theoretical, philosophical, and socialscientific discussions of difference. This literature is extensive and diffuse, yet the classicComicsGrid Have you sern? #OA ebook:@ComicsGrid Year One- direct link to ePubdownload: db.tt/9a05Jvba more info:goo.gl/KwF1W #Grid1 #3 hours ago · reply  · retweet · fav oriteComicsGrid @Robgog Hi! Good morning. We hopeyou are well and haven't given up on ourinterview! ;-) Cheers!6 hours ago · reply  · retweet · fav oritejafurtado Print Book and E-Book Sales Feed IntoEach Other, Says Lulu.com (DBW)digitalbookworld.com/2012/print-boo…15 hours ago · reply  · retweet · fav orite20/04/2012 The English Bugaboo – Cruikshank to Talbot | The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship | Jam…3/6www.comicsgrid.com/2011/07/cruikshank-talbot/On FacebookAcademic DiaryApril 11, 2012 – PCA/ACA NationalConference, 11-12 April 2012, BostonApril 13, 2012 – The 9th University ofFlorida Comics Conference, "Monsters inthe Margins" 13-15 April 2012, FloridaApril 27, 2012 – Cradled in Caricature2012, 27 April 2012, University of Kent, UKMay 10, 2012 – 2nd Annual Conference ofthe Popular Culture Association of Canada,May 10th-12th, 2012, Niagara Falls, OntarioMay 12, 2012 – Twenty-First CenturyBritish Fiction – A Symposium Saturday 12May 2012, Birkbeck, University of LondonMay 17, 2012 – Contemporary ScreenNarratives: Storytelling’s Digital andIndustrial Contexts, 17 May 2012, Universityof Nottingham, UKMay 19, 2012 – Symposium: Popular MediaCultures - Writing in the Margins andReading Between the Lines, 19 May 2012,LondonJune 15, 2012 – Rocky MountainConference on Comics and Graphic Novels,15-16 June 2012, Denver, ColoradoJune 28, 2012 – The Third InternationalComics Conference: Comics Rock, 28-29June 2012, Bournemouth University, UKJuly 3, 2012 – 6th Global ConferenceVisual Literacies 2012 Conference, 3-5 July2012, Mansfield College, Oxford, UKJuly 11, 2012 – EUPOP 2012, 11-13 July2012, University of the Arts, London, UKJuly 16, 2012 – Digital Humanities 2012,16-22 July 2012, University of Hamburg,GermanyJuly 22, 2012 – Comics & Medicine:Navigating the Margins 22-24 July 2012Toronto, CanadaSeptember 7, 2012 – The Graphic Novel.An At the Interface Project, 7-9 September2012, Mansfield College, Oxford, UKSeptember 26, 2012 – Segundo CongresoInternacional Viñetas Serias, 26-19Septiembre 2012, Biblioteca Nacional –remarks remain those found in David Hume’s formidable A Treatise of Human Nature:A fourth unphilosophical species of probability is that deriv’d from general rules, which are the sourceof what we properly call PREJUDICE. An Irishman cannot have wit, and a Frenchman cannot havesolidarity; for which reason, though the conversation of the former in any instance be visib lyagreeable, and of the latter very judicious, we have entertained such a prejudice against them, thatthey must be dunces or fops in spite of sense and reason. Human nature is very subject to envy ofthis kind; and perhaps this nation as much as any other.Hume, p. 4.This ‘prejudice’  ( Hume,  Book 1, Part III, Sect XIII, pp. 146-7)  constructs counter-experiential‘stereotypes’ (coined in Walter Lippmann’s 1922 classic Public Opinion), 5 as a willing socialfabric powerfully fixates abstract types within their arts for use as referents to define individualsor groups encountered in lived experience (so the miser is ‘Jewish’ and the fop is ‘Frenchified’).6 What this foregrounds is the ignorance inherent within stereotyping, demanding that we, likeTalbot, turn our attentions upon those constructing anti-types, for what Alice in Sunderlandmakes explicit is the ambiguity central to the bugaboo – that it is constructed by anotherbugaboo. Dent W., "The National Assembly or meeting of the three Estates" (22 January 1790) BM7623253 x 423" © The Trustees of the British Museum. Second, jealousy has agency in capitulating prejudice and stereotyping into public acceptance(see panels 7-8). For example, jealous of Scots startling success as inventors, thinkers,medical innovators and empire builders, Dent in his 1790 THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY ORMEETING OF THE THREE ESTATES places a Scotch ‘Secret Beast’ behind the Englishthrone, referencing fears of a disproportionate and furtive highland influence suffocatingEnglishness 7Third, the xenophobia which constructs bugaboos (Talbot’s ‘intolerance of the Other’) is amarketable commodity. This is evident in panel 3 of AiS where the DAILY BILGE attractsreaders with willingly false and implicitly racist headlines such as ‘ASYLUM SEEKERS SWAMPBRITAIN!’. Interestingly scholarly orthodoxy maintains that xenophobia was equally marketableto audiences of Georgian graphic satire. 8 But what differs between tabloids and graphic satireis that whilst the bugaboos in the latter are satiric and consciously ambiguous, those in theformer are only ambiguous when read from a vantage point outside of their (potential/likely)audience. Talbot’s bugaboo then forces us to reconsider the audience of past mediums whichinvoked the bugaboo, and to consider potential duality in the bugaboo’s marketability – as atone and the same time xenophobic and comically ambiguous.This essay has shown that the bugaboo in English graphic satire speaks to discourses offoreign threat by pointing to the manifest ambiguity within such discourses – namely that thosemaking threatening bugaboos are themselves threatening bugaboos. As these bugaboos haveformed part of the ‘cartoonists armoury’ (as Ernst Gombrich famously called it) of the Britishillustrative tradition for over two and a half centuries, it behoves us then to explore when andwhere the bugaboo problematises orthodoxies regarding English society, culture, andcommunication.20/04/2012 The English Bugaboo – Cruikshank to Talbot | The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship | Jam…4/6www.comicsgrid.com/2011/07/cruikshank-talbot/Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de BuenosAires, ArgentinaNovember 15, 2012 – 2º ColóquioInternacional Filosofia e Quadrinhos. 15-18November 2012, Rio de Janeiro, BrazilJune 24, 2013 – Joint International GraphicNovel and International Bande DessinéeConferences, 24-28 June 2013, Universitiesof Glasgow and Dundee, UKBack IssuesSelect MonthTranslate to:EnglishTranslatePowered by  Google Translate.Blog Twitter REFERENCESColley, L. (1992) Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London: Vintage).Conway, S. (2000) The British Isles and the American War of Independence (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press).Cruikshank I., “The French Bugaboo Frightening the Royal Commanders” (14 April 1797, S WFores) BM 9005 271 x 499″ © The Trustees of the British Museum.Dent W., “The National Assembly or meeting of the three Estates” (22 January 1790) BM7623253 x 423″ © The Trustees of the British Museum.Echeruo, M. (1978)  The Conditioned Imagination from Shakespeare to Conrad: Studies in theExo-cultural Stereotype (London: Macmillan)Felsenstein, F. (1995) Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English PopularCulture , 1660-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).Hume, D. (1739-40, 1967) Treatise on Human Nature ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Blackwell).Lippmann, W. (1922) Public Opinion. (New York: MacMillan)Johnson, S. (1755) A Dictionary of the English Language. ed. Richard Bentley.Talbot, B. (2007) Alice in Sunderland (London: Jonathan Cape).1. OED ↩2. This is not to say that the 1790s single sheet graphic satire performed the samesocial function as the late-twentieth century graphic novel. For although the twomay display outward similarities and share the same representational chronology,the technological processess of production and the audiences they reached vastlydiffer. As scholars we await a thorough analysis of the relationship betweentechnology, business exigencies, and consumption with respect to graphic satireacross the last three centuries, and in its absence we must confine our diachronicanalyses to representation. ↩3. The former being  the Austrian Commander who was defeated by Napoleon duringthe Italian campaign of 1796-7; the latter had been commander of the British Armysince 1795, and due to his inexperience (and suspected incompetence) waswidely expected by satirists to be defeated by Napoleon ↩4. see Richard Newton, A BUGABOO!!! (2 June 1792, William Holland) ↩5. Meaning in this context ‘to prepossess with unexamined opinions’, see SamuelJohnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) ↩6. see Lippmann W. (1922) A Public Opinion (76-100) ↩7. See Echeruo (1978) and Felsenstein (1995) ↩8. A suspicion of Scottish profiteering from England’s foreign endeavours isobservable during the American conflict of 1775-83, see Conway pp. 178-9. ↩About the authorJames Baker has published 4 articles on this journal.I am an Associate Lecturer in School of History at the University of Kent,Canterbury, Project Manager of the ESRC funded 'City and Region, 1400-1914'project, collaborator with the British Cartoon Archive, and lead investigator of'Cradled in Caricature' (symposium June 2011; conference Spring 2012). InSeptember 2010 I completed a PhD in Cartoons and Caricature at the Universityof Kent, Canterbury, the title of which was 'Isaac Cruikshank and the notion ofBritish Liberty, 1783-1811'. My thesis explored liberty through fashion, genderand custom, and sought to apply economic and technological exigencies to ourunderstanding of the processes of print production. My interests includeGeorgian visual satire, the Covent Garden old price riots of September 1809 toJanuary 1810, diachronic themes with respect to the construction andcommunication of humour in graphic discourses between the seventeenth andlate-nineteenth centuries, and the digital humanities. In what spare time is left Imoonlight as a neurohumanities skeptic.Post to TwitterAdd to TumblrAdd to LinkedIn20/04/2012 The English Bugaboo – Cruikshank to Talbot | The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship | Jam…5/6www.comicsgrid.com/2011/07/cruikshank-talbot/"He do the police indifferent voices": MartinRowson's Pulp ModernismThe Batman Adventures:Rendering the Comic PageBranca de Neve: PregnantMomentsRelated posts:3 Responses to “The English Bugaboo – Cruikshank to Talbot”Leave a Reply NAME (REQUIRED) MAIL (WILL NOT BE PUBLISHED) (REQUIRED) WEBSITEXHTML: The following tags are allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquotecite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>Ernesto Priego - July 26, 2011Thank you very much for this insightful post, James. I love how you have setTalbot’s work in a historical context, reconnecting it not only to cartooning ingeneral but to British cartooning in specific. I always liked this page, for bothaesthetic and political reasons. I particularly like how each panelemphasises the extra-textual referentiality of the subject matter by beingrepresented as pages torn out of a notebook. The page shows a finishedwork which wants to evoke the unfinishedness or work-in-progress-ness ofthe sketch. Moreover, the whole page suggests translations ortransferences of different orders (notebook to page, page to book, sketchto drawing, notes to essay), and perhaps importantly denotes theimportance of the grid (panel layout) and how different it is, in terms of thedepiction of time passing, than, say, the sequential page-after-page of anotebook. I, of course, also liked very much how you have mapped-out athematic genealogy or logic singled out in the motif of the Bugaboo.ReplyJames Baker - July 26, 2011I’d actually never put much thought into the notebook aesthetic.I guess I’d always assumed there was something to do with reportinggoing on here, as the designs in each panel remind me of the sortsof shots one might see on a news report (the talking head; the‘reporter’ strolling towards/across camera shot).ReplyMary Branscombe - March 23, 2012It might be interesting to note that Talbot is a fan of Hogarth and his politicalcartoons…Reply20/04/2012 The English Bugaboo – Cruikshank to Talbot | The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship | Jam…6/6www.comicsgrid.com/2011/07/cruikshank-talbot/ Except where otherwise noted, The Comics Grid is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Switch to our mobile site(Code is Poetry).Submit Comment

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Public Opinion.

The Conditioned Imagination from Shakespeare to Conrad: Studies in the Exo-cultural Stereotype (London: Macmillan) Felsenstein,

The French Bugaboo Frightening the Royal Commanders”

The National Assembly or meeting of the three

The English Bugaboo - Cruikshank to Talbot

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The English Bugaboo - Cruikshank to Talbot

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