CATALAN CARTOONS: A Cultural and Political History

2013

This thesis considers the Catalan satirical cartooning tradition in the period 1898 to 1977. It breaks from current approaches in Catalan cultural studies and Humour Theory in several significant ways. First, across four chronologically divided chapters – beginning with the post-colonial period through to Franco’s dictatorship – the study considers how Catalan satire was shaped by a shifting socio-political context and to what extent it, in turn, played a role in shaping that context. Here, it engages with humour’s role in identity construction through in-group solidarity. Second, supporting its inclusive position that a continued tradition can be observed throughout the twentieth century, the thesis looks beyond the common cut-off point of the Spanish Civil War by engaging with Catalan satirical cartoons in exile, in the clandestine press and in children’s comics during the Franco period. Third, it tests a multimodal framework that combines three major theories of humour: superiority, incongruity and release-relief, with Gestalt Visual Organisational Principles and socio-political context to produce a three-dimensional analysis of cartoon case studies. These cases have been selected from the most representative publications and cartoonists of the period and include the work of Tísner, Escobar and Cesc. The framework incorporates an expansion of superiority humour theory by raising the profile of the inferiority factor. More importantly, it marks a move towards addressing a verbal-centric imbalance in existing approaches to humour. Introducing the previously undervalued Catalan tradition to humour discourse, while at the same time injecting a much-needed academic approach to Catalan cartoon humour, the thesis also highlights the important potential of cartoons as a resource in Catalan Studies and in cultural analysis in general.

The Humorous Times. Newsletter of the International Society for Humor Studies, 2016

Abelenda, Eduard, and Lucila Mallart. ‘Review of “Catalan Cartoons. A Cultural and Political History by Rhiannon McGlade (University of Wales Press, 2016)”’. The Humorous Times. Newsletter of the International Society for Humor Studies 29, no. 3 (2016): 6–7.

International Journal of Iberian Studies, 2019

Article published in: Irony and Humor: From pragmatics to discourse. Edited by L. Ruiz Gurillo and M. B. Alvarado. [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 231] 2013. pp. 141–158 This chapter has as its main aim to reflect on humorous communication taking as a reference the graphic jokes (or cartoons) which appear in the press. Our reflection will start with an attempt to define what graphic jokes are as a particular genre within the so-called ‘humorous genres.’ This definition has a twofold objective: the first one is to delimit the study object for this paper; the second one, to check the way in which the characteristics of this genre or its components may influence our description of humorous communication. In this respect, the description of humor (and that of other related phenomena: irony, sarcasm and lie) in cartoons will incorporate a specific component, the one deriving from what is inherent to cartoons; and another general one which is common to any humorous communicative situation. There will obviously be communicating vessels between both. Secondly, we plan to describe the framework from which pragmatic analysis is going to be carried out. It is worth highlighting beforehand that our research will assume ideas and proposals of Grice (1975), Levinson (2000), Raskin (1985) and Attardo (1994, 1997, 2001, 2006), or Schank and Abelson (1977). The last section focuses on explaining how this all materializes in the specific analysis of cartoons. 300 graphic jokes which appeared in the Spanish press between 2007 and 2012 served as the starting point for our work. Some of these cartoons will help illustrate the phenomena analyzed here.

Culture & History Digital Journal 8(1), 2019

La Traca was a weekly magazine published in Valencia between 1884 and 1892 and between 1909 and 1938, with periods during which it was not published because of governmental censorship. Because it was written in Valencian, the vernacular language of where it was published, it did not go beyond being a magazine of local, or at most regional, interest, circulation and importance. However, its editor, Vicente Miguel Carceller, made the decision in 1931 to edit the magazine in Spanish and he thus conquered the country's market, resulting in circulation figures that no other publication had ever reached. La Traca was the most loved and hated of all satirical publications. This article explores its characteristics and its ideology, it investigates how it resolved its conflicts and the terrible ending destiny afforded it. We work on the hypothesis that laughter helps dissolve cultural hegemony, since it balances on the edge between what is real and imagined; what is possible and dreamed.

Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 2016

Introduction. This article aims to identify the different themes explored in the comic strips published by the Basque newspaper Egin (1977/98) during its first year of operations. This nationalist newspaper had a great impact on the Basque society during the Spanish transition to democracy because it was the first left-wing publication in the Basque Country and because it devoted a whole page to graphic humour. Method. The study is based on the thematic analysis of the comic strips published in the entertainment section of the aforementioned newspaper throughout 1977. Quantitative techniques were used to identify and measure the frequency of occurrence of the diversity of issues and themes. Results and conclusions. The results show the clear preference of cartoonists for issues related to the promotion of democracy, as well as the existence of an opposition within the premises of traditional Basque nationalism against the new form of nationalism promoted by leftist movements.

International journal of media and information literacy, 2022

This article intends to introduce the topic of Six Information Revolutions based on Irving Fang's views in the book A History of Mass Communications. In a short review, the history of the emergence of caricature and cartoon is discussed and then the functions and importance of political cartoons in the mass media are examined. This assertion is generally agreed upon that the main place and origin of cartoons is in the press and political cartoons have a long life along with the print media. Relying on this fact, the evolution of political cartoons, especially in the period of the second information revolution, i.e. the Printing Revolution and afterward in the third revolution, i.e. the Mass Media Revolution, has been scrutinized. With the development of the printing industry and publishing of newspapers in high circulation, cartoons became available to the public as an important part of the traditional print media; quickly gained popularity and profound influence, and provided a new outlet for information. And it became a new way of launching socio-political debates. Finally, in a holistic approach, today's pluralized media landscape and the challenges facing editorial cartoonists in the new media space have been analyzed.

European Comic Art

This article traces the formation of comics art scholarship in Spain from 1965 to 1975. This decade witnessed the beginning of the study of comics as a serious object of cultural analysis. Reading formations surrounding the medium – in particular, historical and critical reading protocols – and a set of key critical debates were concurrent with the establishment and the development of mass communication studies as an incipient field of research in Spain in the mid-1960s. The aim of this article is to provide a close examination of the first generation of critics participating in and writing about the scene in relation to hitherto overlooked local and transnational contexts that shaped the constitution of the Spanish field of comics.

2014

The beginning of the new millennium (the year 2000 to 2010) has witnessed a dramatic increase in the political cartoons’ research. By their nature, political cartoons constitute a specific genre of political reporting in that they are pictorial representations which depict political and social issues and events, as well as the parties involved, in an immediate and condensed form. The genre is characterised by humorous depiction of events, exploiting the ability of irony and satire to unravel, ridicule and attack in a playful, witty and artful fashion (Test, 1991). They project a particular point of view (El Refaie, 2009) and enlighten readers on public issues while exposing wrong practices (Akande, 2002). Due to the increasing research on political cartoons, this study reviews previous studies conducted in the area from the beginning of the millennium (2000) to the year 2010 that marks the first decade of the 21st century millennium. It is hoped that the review will highlight how ...

Political cartoons are a powerful communicative weapon. They can distract, joke but they can also provide social commentaries on key aspects of reality. Although not always acknowledged, cartoons are a key element on political communication. In this paper, we investigate editorial cartoons potential to political communication and take them as communicative artifacts capable of enhancing political comprehension and reconceptualization of events, through specific frames of understanding. By looking into the double standard thesis, by which cartoonists tend to contrast the posturing, destructive, wastage of politics with the purposive, constructive efficiency of business (Morris, 1992: 254), we try to assess if that same tendency to frame politics and business befalls as well in Portuguese political cartoons. Based on a notrepresentative sample, we proceed to a rhetorical analysis of three contemporary Portuguese political cartoons in which business tends to be associated with purpose and efficiency, while politics is portrayed as a wasteful, vain, otiose activity. By representing politics and business in such a dissimilar way, these cartoons tend to validate in Portugal the double standard thesis, and raises the possibility it can actually be applied to trans-national contexts.