Introduction

Scholarly interest in political cartoons seems to stem from the inherent argumentative nature of this genre, on the one hand, and the role that cartoons play in public debate (Groarke 2009), on the other. The widespread dis-content and criticisms that the Danish cartoons which ridiculed Prophet Mohammed spurred in the Muslim world is a good example of the impact that cartoons can have worldwide. Blair (2004) ascribes the distinctive nature of political cartoons to the level of explicitness and precision of meaning that this genre permits compared with other visual genres. The genre of political cartoons allows the condensation of historical and cultural events and social relationships within a single frame (Slyomovics 2001). Cartoons can ‘recon-textualize events and evoke references in ways that a photograph or a film cannot’ (Slyomovics 2001: 72).

Visual presentations in cartoons, as Edwards (2004) expounds, create images which define social realities. A number of studies have explored the role of visual metaphors in different multimodal genres, such as advertising (Forceville 1996, 2002; Kjeldsen 2012, 2015), films (Carroll 1996; Wildfeuer 2014) and cartoons (Bounegru and Forceville 2011; El Refaie 2003, 2009; Kennedy 1993; Groarke 1998, 2009). In this chapter, a visual metaphor is not examined from a cognitive point of view, that is, as a framing device that structures and defines social situations and events (El Refaie 2003; Hart 2017). Instead, a visual metaphor is conceived as a visual argument inasmuch as it attempts to convince the audience of a particular political stance or point of view by offering reasons in support of claims (Birdsell and Groarke 2007; Feteris 2013; Feteris et al. 2011; Groarke 1998, 2009). In political or editorial cartoons, the mechanism of offering reasons in support of claims/standpoints is mainly communicated through visual images such as visual metaphors or cultural images. Based on this view, political cartoons are envisaged as an argumentative activity type aimed at convincing the ‘audience of a particular critical standpoint by means of argumentation consisting of a visual metaphor, often in combination with text’ (Feteris 2013: 416).

From an argumentative point of view, visual images are perceived as indirect speech acts that function as visual arguments advanced to defend standpoints (Feteris et al. 2011).