Abstract
Although Dominion soldiers’ Great War field publications are relatively well known, the way troops created cartoon multi-panel formats in some of them has been neglected as a record of satirical social observation. Visual narrative humour provides a ‘bottom-up’ perspective for journalistic observations that in many cases capture the spirit of the army in terms of stoicism, buoyed by a culture of internal complaints. Troop concerns expressed in the early comic strips of Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and British were similar. They shared a collective editorial purpose of morale boosting among the ranks through the use of everyday narratives that elevated the anti-heroism of the citizen soldier, portrayed as a transnational everyman in the service of empire. The regenerative value of disparagement humour provided a redefinition of courage as the very act of endurance on the Western Front.
Highlights
The First World War represented the peak of soldier newspaper production, textual expressions by soldiers in their own trench and troopship newspapers are relatively well known (Fuller, 1990; Seal, 1990, 2013a, 2013b; Kent, 1999; Nelson, 2010, 2011), but the way the men created and used cartoon multi-panel format is not
Humorous visual self-expression represents a record of satirical social observation from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective, with potential to contribute to the trend towards use of a wider range of sources in First World War historiography
The regenerative value of ‘disparagement humour’ in the context of illustrative narratives by Canadian and Dominion soldiers meant that a new kind of courage was reimagined
Summary
The First World War represented the peak of soldier newspaper production, textual expressions by soldiers in their own trench and troopship newspapers are relatively well known (Fuller, 1990; Seal, 1990, 2013a, 2013b; Kent, 1999; Nelson, 2010, 2011), but the way the men created and used cartoon multi-panel format is not. Much of the scholarship on mentalités during the war centres on psychological human resilience (Watson, 2008) and emotional survival (Roper, 2009), but by and large without resort to trench publications as a source, despite the fact that publications included parodies of news stories and of advertisements, snippets of gossip, jokes, poetry, anecdotes, cartoons as well as sequential illustrative narratives.
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