Having completed some work on commerce and oil spills, my work on this project (see earlier post) has now moved on to nuclear science, weapons, and opposition in British cartoons. Below is a my first draft of how this section will open:
Nuclear weapons, testing, threats and fears were a central political narrative of the twentieth century. The existence, power, persistence, and apocalyptic potential of nuclear weaponry were also central to the emergence of a strong environmental rhetoric in the western world. Unsurprisingly therefore cartoon responses to the nuclear problem were (and remain) both legion and myriad. Moreover the visual language of nuclear warfare and fallout have been used to inform and augment comic commentaries upon a variety of subjects.
Threading clear representational threads through and trends from this vast corpus is not the purpose of this section. Instead, it presents striking examples of how 'the bomb' has been imagined by British cartoonists, as a facet of a wider conversation upon man's flirtation with self-induced apocalypse.
Threading clear representational threads through and trends from this vast corpus is not the purpose of this section. Instead, it presents striking examples of how 'the bomb' has been imagined by British cartoonists, as a facet of a wider conversation upon man's flirtation with self-induced apocalypse.
(c) British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, David Low, Evening Standard (02 Jan 1928) LSE 0326
“She came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high [...] Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw”
Much like Lewis Carroll's Alice, a small boy of 1928 peeks with intrigue behind a curtain. He is met with a feast of technological invention, an imagined future of weather control, robots, and communicative media (here 'TELETASTE' stands out as a particularly jovial comic flourish). However among these delights of utopian and egalitarian optimism stands three portentous potentialities – 'THE FINAL POISON GAS?', 'THE FINAL EXPLOSIVE?', 'THE HARNESSED ATOM'?.
“She came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high [...] Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw”
Much like Lewis Carroll's Alice, a small boy of 1928 peeks with intrigue behind a curtain. He is met with a feast of technological invention, an imagined future of weather control, robots, and communicative media (here 'TELETASTE' stands out as a particularly jovial comic flourish). However among these delights of utopian and egalitarian optimism stands three portentous potentialities – 'THE FINAL POISON GAS?', 'THE FINAL EXPLOSIVE?', 'THE HARNESSED ATOM'?.
Post-war optimism, science-fiction, and technological achievement combined to create an aura of optimism in the 1920s. Things hitherto imagined could, it seemed, be brought into actuality. Yet as Alice discovered as she traversed Wonderland, appearances can deceive and the beneficial does not always discern itself clearly from the troublesome. Low here plays upon this conundrum, thereby problematising the hope underpinning scientific prediction. Little did he know that Ernest Rutherford's model of the atom, discoveries in astrophysics, and the experiments with radioactivity and nuclear physics to which he refers in this piece, would in the coming years form the basis of an atomic weapon possessing such shocking violence, toxicity, and finality.
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