ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates a number of earlier studies which pertain to “political cartoons.” A critical survey of these studies highlights some of the theoretical problems attending an attempt to present a theory of pictorial framing and a system of image-text relations in the op-ed genre. On the basis of the strengths and weaknesses of these previous approaches, the choice of editorial imagery as corpus material is explained. Here, two types of editorial imagery are distinguished: cartoons and illustrations. It is claimed that the (sub)genre to which an image or word and image text belongs is an important contextual factor, and that visual meaning is an intricate web of connected frames (here, links with narratology and non-verbal or multimodal intertextuality are touched upon). Finally, the relationships between words and images are explored in terms of Barthes’ concepts of “relaying” and “anchoring.” But in order to discover what really goes on inside the belly of the op-ed beast, six of the creators of the illustrations used in Chapter 6 are interviewed.
