What Is a Cartoon? A Word That Changed Jobs Twice

The word comes from the Italian cartone, meaning heavy paper or pasteboard, and named the full-scale drawing made before executing a wall painting, a stained glass window or a tapestry. Because fresco must be painted onto wet plaster in sections completed the same day, the design has to be worked out completely in advance and transferred quickly, which was done by pricking the cartoon's outlines and dusting charcoal through the holes, or by tracing over the lines with a stylus to incise them into the plaster. Cartoons were therefore working documents, usually damaged in transfer and discarded. The few that survive are consequently extraordinary objects, including Raphael's designs for the Sistine Chapel tapestries and Leonardo's cartoon of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John, and they preserve a stage of the artist's thinking that the finished work conceals.

In 1843 the rebuilt Houses of Parliament were to be decorated with frescoes, and an exhibition of submitted cartoons was held in Westminster Hall. Punch magazine responded with a series of drawings it called Mr Punch's cartoons, mocking the expense of decorating a palace while the poor went hungry, the best remembered being John Leech's image of ragged people viewing the grand designs. The joke transferred the word from the preparatory drawing to the satirical one, and it stuck completely, so that within a generation cartoon meant a humorous or satirical drawing and the original sense survived only among art historians. Political caricature itself was much older, with Hogarth, Gillray and Rowlandson producing savage printed satires decades earlier, and what Punch added was the periodical format, a regular weekly image commenting on current events, which established the editorial cartoon as a fixture of newspapers everywhere.

Three distinct practices now share the word and each has its own conventions:

• •The single-panel gag cartoon, which delivers a joke in one image plus a caption, and whose craft lies in how much situation can be established before the caption lands
• •The editorial or political cartoon, which argues rather than merely jokes, relying on caricature, visual metaphor and a shared stock of symbols that readers recognise instantly
• •The comic strip, which uses sequence, with panel size and gutter spacing controlling pace, and which developed its own grammar in newspapers from the 1890s
• •Animation, which took the drawn style into film and developed techniques including the exposure sheet, the cel system and the twelve principles of animation codified at Disney
• •The comic book and graphic novel, which extended sequential drawing to long-form narrative
• •Caricature as a technique running through all of them, exaggerating distinctive features so that recognition is faster than realism would allow

The editorial cartoon has a specific power that written comment lacks, and it comes from compression and deniability. A single image can juxtapose two things and assert a relationship between them without arguing for it, which is rhetorically extremely efficient and frequently unfair. Caricature reduces a public figure to a few marks, and once a cartoonist establishes a visual shorthand it becomes part of how the public sees that person, with several politicians acquiring permanent features in the public imagination from a cartoonist's exaggeration. That power is why cartoonists are prosecuted, imprisoned and attacked, from Daumier imprisoned in 1832 for depicting the French king as Gargantua, through the suppression of cartoonists under many regimes, to lethal attacks in recent decades. The form is also declining commercially, since staff cartoonist positions have been cut heavily as newspapers contracted, which has moved much of the work to freelancing and to online publication where the economics are worse and the reach is larger.

Cartoon originally named a full-size preparatory drawing on heavy paper, used to transfer a design onto wet plaster, and the few that survive show a stage the finished work hides. Punch magazine transferred the word to satire in 1843 by mocking an exhibition of cartoons for decorating the new Houses of Parliament. It now covers single-panel gags, editorial argument, comic strips and animation, and the editorial form's power comes from asserting a relationship between two things without having to argue for it.