Flirting with Apocalypse - Part 3: Whales

Flirting with Apocalypse (for the CARD project at the British Cartoon Archive) is nearly done. This sample section on whaling was completed today along with a final piece on natural disasters. Carl Giles on whaling. Who'd have thought it?


On Tuesday 21 July 1981 the International Whaling Commission met at Brighton's Metropole Hotel for their annual conference. On the agenda was a worldwide ban on the commercial killing of whales. Japan led a successful opposition to the proposals, and despite nations voting 16-8 in favour of a ban with three abstentions, the requirement of a three-fourths majority ensured the ban did not pass.

(c) British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, Carl Giles, Daily Express, 21 Jul 1981.

Carl Giles, in his typically apolitical style, comments on the situation with compassion, sympathy and jollity. "I'm afraid that whale the gentleman's been giving the kiss-of-life to for the last half hour happens to be one of these 'ere rubber ones" says a seaman. Yet the eye is drawn to the energy with which the anti-whaling campaigner goes about his task, and the broad, warm, satisfied smile of the 'rubber' whale he is trying to save. Campaigners, Giles tells us, may occasionally have more passion than sense, but the beasts they are trying to save are worth every ounce of effort.

A year later the IWC meeting voted through a complete ban on commercial whaling. Environmentalists celebrated their first major international political triumph.

Flirting with Apocalypse - Part 2: Nukes

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.

(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'?.

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.

Flirting with Apocalypse - Part 1: Christmas

I have recently been commissioned by the British Cartoon Archive to produce a series of teaching and learning aids using their digital collections (as an appendage to the JISC funded CARD project). These aids will take the form of groups of cartoons selected, interpreted and given scholarly context by me, and will be made live on the BCA website in the coming months.
This morning I've been working on a group entitled 'Flirting with Apocalypse', which plans to go beyond the 20th century symbol of doomsday, the atomic bomb, and explore through cartoons man's relationship with what Al Gore famously called 'our only home'. Themes such as rural erosion, consumerism, oil spills, green politics and natural disasters will be covered, with the aim of offering students a starting point towardss thinking about how man's construction of their world (not only physically, but also mentally) impacts upon the environment we all inhabit.

Over the coming weeks I plan to share some preliminary findings here. And today I offer some thoughts Christmas:

        Michael Heath, The Independent (7 Dec 1998) PC5102

        http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/record/PC5102

Christmas is, despite its spiritual origins, the modern symbol of reckless and conspicuous consumption. Moreover its centrality to annual trade cycles and its use to gauge such virtual signifiers as 'economic growth' and 'consumer confidence' demonstrate the exploitative mentality of big business.

Heath's bold, brash style may make for an obvious critique of consumerism (notably how Christmas as greed subverts its selfless origins), but subtle witty commentaries remain present. Note, for example, the few figures picked out of this otherwise faceless parade. Towards the bottom right two middle-aged businessmen, frustrated and anxious, make their way from the busy high street. Nearby a well dressed female raises her voice to a crying child. Behind them small groups, including women sporting what resemble fine ushanka hats, browse the shop windows. These well-to-do types represent the chaos, the hysteria, the madness of the 'SPEND! SPEND! SPEND! SPEND! SPEND!' mentality, and they contrast starkly with the less orthodox figures who stand bemused, and speak for the cartoonist/left-leaning Independent reader, in the bottom left-hand corner. This couple are not exempt from critique, they after all carry a gaudily wrapped gift, yet they cut through the masquerade and see Christmas as it really is. The signs reading 'BE GREEDY IT'S COOL' and 'GET LEGLESS THIS CHRISTMAS' are then what they project onto the scene - once the glitzy mask, under considerable strain, has cracked, this Christian festival is revealed to them as in reality a hyper-consumerist Vanity Fair.