“To Him Pudel, Bite Him Peper”

The Image. The hats perched and tilting from head to warring head. The dogs snarling. The bodies strangely hovering. 

Early cartoonists deployed armies of humans and animals to do battle on the page. Animals, comical, bestial, atavistic, conjured in the long tradition of the bestiary, companions, mascots or familiars to their Royalist Cavalier and Parliamentarian Round-Head masters. 

The hats bobbing, fingers jabbing, paws hovering. The pages. The attack, the whispering, back and forth, back and forth, tilting. 

The first English Civil War was distinguished in British history for its inventive, scurrilous and prolific pamphleteering, the word-war described as ‘paper bullets’ and ‘paper-skirmishes’: early psycho-op warfare as vicious and effective as actual bloody combat. 

A long-held truism among British historians: every generation (of historians) refights the English Civil War. This generation it’s crept out of the history books and into real life, our English Civil War fought not through pamphlet but social media. A modern-day bestiary still hints at more atavistic urges beneath, the images detritus, symptoms of incomplete suppression; the death wish, opportunistically finding a new unguarded route to the surface by digital means: cruel, destructive, anarchic, infantile, and sadistic, wishing to divide and destroy. 

The hats bobbing, fingers jabbing, paws hovering. The information back and forth, back and forth. The screens. The hats bobbing. A psych-op typography. Bobbing, tilting, whispering, arguing, jabbing, denouncing, battling. Back and forth, titling and bobbing.