visual communication

ARTICLE

Metaphors in editorial cartoons

representing the global financial crisis

LILIANA BOUNEGRU AND CHARLES FORCEVILLE

University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

ABSTRACT
Lakoff and Johnson claim that metaphors play a crucial role in systemati-
cally structuring concepts, not just language. Probing the validity of this
far-reaching claim requires an investigation of multimodal discourse. In this
article, the authors analyse the 25 metaphors that structure a sample of 30
political cartoons pertaining to the global financial crisis that hit the world
in 2008, and find that certain source domains recur systematically. They
examine the role of visual and verbal modalities and argue that metaphors
are manifestations of underlying conceptual ones. In the service of future
research pertaining to multimodal metaphor and multimodal discourse, the
authors also reflect on the methodological problems they encountered, and
on the decisions they took to solve them.

KEY WORDS
conceptual metaphor theory • genre • multimodal discourse • pictorial and
multimodal metaphor • political cartoons

1. INTRODUCTION
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) influentially argued that the human conceptual
system is to a considerable extent metaphorically structured, famously claim-
ing that ‘metaphor is primarily a matter of thought and action and only deriv-
atively a matter of language’ (p. 153). More specifically, they claim that human
beings conceptualize abstract ideas in terms of concrete experiences, the latter
being experiences that pertain directly to the body (sense perception, motor
activity, physical pain and pleasure, heat and cold, etc.). This latter aspect of
their theory is nowadays usually referred to as ‘the embodied mind’ (Lakoff
and Johnson, 1999: 16) or, more generally, ‘embodiment’ (p. 102). We cau-
tiously subscribe to this Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT: for a survey of
its current state, see Gibbs, 2008; Kövecses, 2010), but submit that its further

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 assessment requires that analyses are extended from mere verbal discourse
(a term we prefer to the word ‘text’, because of the latter’s strong verbal associ-
ations) to pictorial and multimodal discourse (Forceville, 1996; Forceville and
Urios-Aparisi, 2009). It is important to focus such analyses on discourses in a
specific genre since genre is a crucial framing device governing the interpreta-
tion of metaphors (Forceville, 2002, 2006a). While advertising has hitherto
been the multimodal genre most often addressed within CMT, the political
cartoon is now beginning to attract attention as well (El Refaie, 2003, 2009;
Schilperoord and Maes, 2009; Yus, 2009).
In this article, we analyse a number of editorial cartoons published in
October 2008 that portray the global financial crisis, with the purpose of iden-
tifying: (1) how pictorial and verbal means of expressions are used to create
metaphors; and (2) whether, and if so, how these metaphors can be traced to
underlying conceptual metaphors. Specifically, we aim to answer the following
questions:

• How do the employed modalities (verbal, visual, or both) contribute to

the construal of the metaphor?
• Which conceptual domains are used to predicate something
metaphorically about the financial crisis?
• Are the metaphors manifestations of conceptual metaphors? If so, can
the conceptual metaphors be unambiguously named?

We believe our approach and findings are pertinent to various

­ isciplines. By analysing political cartoons, we further substantiate the claim
d
that metaphors ‘can occur non-verbally and multimodally as well as purely
verbally’ (Forceville, 2006a: 381). This, in turn, aids the development of
­metaphor theory as an analytical instrument of cartoons and, by extension, of
multimodal discourse more generally. Finally, we see our findings as corrobo-
rating the CMT tenet that sees metaphor as human beings’ crucial instrument
for conceptualizing abstract phenomena.
The structure of our argument is as follows. In section 2, we explain
our corpus, terminology and method of analysis. An analysis of the cartoons
is provided in section 3 and patterns are identified. In section 4, we discuss to
what extent the metaphors we have identified can be said to exemplify con-
ceptual metaphors in the sense of CMT, and what the verbal and pictorial
modalities contribute to these metaphors. The final section lists some general
conclusions and outlines suggestions for further research.

2. CORPUS, TERMINOLOGY AND METHOD

OF ANALYSIS
Corpus
The data for this study consist of cartoons created by professional cartoonists
worldwide and published between 15 and 31 October 2008 in print newspapers

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and/or online. This specific time period was selected in order to include impor-
tant events in the early development of the financial crisis, such as the fall of the
stock market and the governmental bailouts offered to financial institutions in
countries affected by the crisis. The cartoons were collected via Daryl Cagle’s
online cartoons database (http://cagle.msnbc.com, accessed 10 March 2009) by
searching the phrase ‘financial crisis’ in the 15 to 31 October 2008 timeframe.
According to the online database, the selected time period was the most prolific
for cartoons related to the financial crisis up to March 2009.
The study of metaphor in cartoons stored in an online database pro-
vides the advantages of a ready-made corpus, as well as of easy access, but
the following issues need addressing. First, the process of image labelling (or
‘tagging’) is not completely reliable, which is why, after the query results of the
tag ‘financial crisis’ were returned, a manual check of the matching between
keyword and image had to be performed. This resulted in the elimination
of two non-matching cartoons (i.e. cartoons not pertaining to the financial
crisis) from the sample. Second, online cartoons from a database lack the
‘discursive context’ they had in their original, newspaper version. This is an
element of major importance in the construal of a metaphor. Saraceni (2003),
for instance, points out that ‘cartoons are like single sentences: in order to
understand them you need to have some extra-textual information’ (p. 36).
In his analogy to language, he defines two types of context: ‘textual context
… the language that surrounds a portion of text’, and ‘extra-textual context,
your knowledge of the world’ (p. 36, emphasis in original). Similarly, El Refaie
(2003) defines ‘discursive context’ as ‘all other items of text on a newspaper
page’ except ‘any language which is located in close proximity to the image and
which is intended to be read in direct conjunction with it’ (p. 86).
When the medium of distribution of political cartoons shifts from
newspapers to the internet, this affects interpretation of the language–image
relation. Some elements specific to the digital medium, such as tags (keywords
assigned to units of information) are thus used by webmasters to compen-
sate at least partially for the absence of the discursive context in online car-
toon databases. The identification of our corpus of cartoons depended on the
prior assignment, by a webmaster, of the tag ‘financial crisis’ to each of the
retrieved images. The characterization of some of our metaphors as crucially
depending on the interaction between word and image (i.e. as multimodal)
may therefore be the consequence of a tag provided by a webmaster rather
than by captions provided by the cartoonist. Therefore, the verbal elements
on which our interpretation of the metaphors in the online cartoons relies
are not just the cartoonist’s captions, but also the webmaster’s tags. This situ-
ation is less awkward than might appear. The political cartoon genre appears
to flourish and to be reaching larger audiences in the internet medium than
in its printed version. Indeed, as Danjoux (2007) argues: ‘the future of the
political cartoon, especially in its digital form, has never seemed brighter’
(p. 247). Taking into account webmasters’ tags when analysing online cartoons

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 is therefore, we submit, a reasonable decision since it is to be expected that in
the future an increasing number of cartoons will appear solely or primarily
online. To what extent systematic shifts of discourses of all kinds from one
medium to another will affect their potential interpretation is an important
issue that is only just beginning to be addressed (see Bateman et al., 2007); we
will not discuss it further here.

Terminology
A metaphor consists of a topic, or ‘target’, and of a vehicle, a ‘source’ – that to
which the target is metaphorically compared. Thus, in ‘love is a battlefield’, ‘love’
is the target, ‘battlefield’ the source. We consider a metaphor ‘pictorial’ (more
precisely: a monomodal metaphor of the pictorial variety) if both target and
source are exclusively or predominantly cued in the visual mode. Characterizing
‘multimodal metaphor’ is more difficult because no generally accepted defi-
nition of ‘multimodality’ yet exists. Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) propose
that ‘modes are semiotic resources which allow the simultaneous realisation of
discourses and types of (inter)action’ (p. 21). Kress (2009) is somewhat more
specific:

Mode is a socially shaped and culturally given resource for making

meaning. Image, writing, layout, music, gesture, speech, moving image,
soundtrack are examples of modes used in representation and com-
munication. (p. 54, emphasis in original)

Jewitt (2009a) states that:

Multimodality describes approaches that understand communication

and representation to be more than about language, and which attend
to the full range of communicational forms people use – image, gesture,
gaze, posture and so on – and the relationships between them. (p. 14)

As transpires from other contributions in Jewitt (2009b), given the right

­circumstances and participants, everything can be made to communicate
something, which entails that every phenomenon is a potential candidate for
‘mode/modality’ status. The absence of an authoritative or exhaustive defini-
tion does not, however, preclude scholarly work on multimodality; we simply
need to be practical (see Bateman, 2008, for an exemplary approach). In our
corpus of political cartoons we categorized every piece of meaningful infor-
mation that did not belong to the verbal mode as belonging to the pictorial,
or visual, mode. A metaphor was thus categorized as multimodal if target
and source were exclusively or predominantly cued in two different modes
(in this case: the verbal and the visual mode). The following test provides a

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useful strategy for distinguishing between pictorial and multimodal meta-
phors: imagine erasing all verbal elements in the cartoon, and

1. if the visuals still allow for identifying a target (always: ‘financial crisis’
or one of its subthemes) and a source, the metaphor is construed as a
pictorial one;
2. if neither target or source becomes unidentifiable, it is construed as a
multimodal metaphor (more specifically: of the verbo-pictorial variety).

Incidentally, if the erasing of all pictorial elements still allows for construal of a
target and source, for instance in the caption, the metaphor is simply a verbal
(i.e. monomodal) metaphor. In that case, the visual elements are not necessary
for the construal of the metaphor – although they may, and usually do, contrib-
ute information not present in the verbal parts (for more discussion of modality
in metaphor, see Eggertsson and Forceville, 2009; Forceville, 2006a, 2008). Note,
furthermore, that in all cases an appropriate knowledge of the target domain in
context by viewers of the cartoons is taken for granted, while the verbalization
of the metaphor is not a self-evident matter – an issue to which we will return.
To recap: given that cartoons can draw on only two modalities, metaphors in
cartoons can be monomodal (either verbal metaphors or pictorial/visual meta-
phors) or multimodal (deploying both the verbal and the visual modalities).

Metaphor identification
To identify something as a metaphor, we used the following criteria:

(1) An identity relation is created between two phenomena that, in the given
context, belong to different categories;
(2) The phenomena are to be understood as target and source, respectively;
they are not, in the context, reversible;
(3) At least one characteristic/connotation associated with the source
domain is to be mapped onto the target domain; often an aligned
structure of connotations is to be so mapped (based on Forceville, 1996;
see also Black, 1979).

Deciding what connotations have been mapped from source to target is the
interpretative part of metaphor analysis. This interpretation is governed by the
assumption that the cartoonist tries to be optimally relevant to the audience,
and is crucially constrained by the genre convention (shared by cartoonist and
audience) that a political cartoon provides an often humorously designed criti-
cism of a public figure or state of affairs in the world. Here, the cartoon amplifies
and exaggerates the negative impact of the global financial crisis, with satirical
effects. Even though this awareness constrains possible interpretations, differ-
ent viewers may infer (slightly or fundamentally) different interpretations.1

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 3. ANALYSIS OF THE ‘CRISIS’ CARTOONS
In this section, we list and discuss the 25 ‘crisis’ metaphors we identified in
our corpus of 30 editorial cartoons2 and analyse the pictorial/multimodal
manifestations of each type. We will discuss the metaphors in four groups of
cartoons that we consider share the same source domain scenario: (1) catas-
trophe/(natural) disaster; (2) illness/death; (3) begging (4) others. The
target domain is always the financial crisis or a phenomenon that is metonymi-
cally associated with it. We will come back to this categorization in section 4.

3.1. Source domain: catastrophe/(natural) disaster

In this cluster we grouped cartoons in which the crisis was understood in
terms of a potentially lethal threat that was caused by forces of nature or by
other circumstances beyond the control of human beings.
A multimodal example occurs in cartoon no. 1, entitled ‘Ice Age – The
Mortgage Meltdown’ (Peray, Thailand, 27 Oct. 2008; see Figure 1: the original
is in colour, as are Figures 2–6). A more precise verbalization of this instance
of the metaphor is downward mortgage chart line is crack in the ice.3
The source domain is pictorially represented, the target domain is cued by two
modalities: the chart line is rendered pictorially, but its identification is nar-
rowed down to a ‘mortgage chart line’ through the caption. Inasmuch as the
latter qualification is a crucial one, the metaphor is a multimodal metaphor
of the verbo-pictorial variety rather than a purely pictorial MP1/contextual
metaphor (see Forceville, 1996: 122–42 for further discussion). The interpreta-
tion of the metaphor is verbally mediated by a reference to the animation film
Ice Age: The Meltdown (directed by Carlos Saldanha, 2006), and pictorially rep-
resented as a slightly altered version of one of the film posters which features
the character known as the ‘sabre-toothed’ squirrel Scrat, the character who
provokes disasters in his avid search for food. The connotations mapped from
source to target can be formulated as a ‘disaster of large proportions with high-
impact negative consequences’. A further metaphor pertaining to the same
‘metaphor scenario’ (Musolff, 2006) is banker is scrat, or mortgage bro-
ker is scrat, where the target is inferred from pictorial cues which create the
stereotypical image of a banker: a man wearing a suit and tie, smoking a cigar,
permanently on the phone. The two domains of this metaphor would prob-
ably be recognized without the verbal message, although it is the caption that
specifies the squirrel-as-businessman as a mortgage broker. The mapped con-
notations inferred via the cultural reference may be ‘guilt’, ‘greed’ and ‘panic’.
A similar metaphor is exemplified in cartoon no. 2, also by Peray,
‘Financial tsunami’ (Thailand, 24 Oct. 2008). Here we see a boy building a
sandcastle on the beach, looking up in horror as a big wave threatens to sweep
him and his castle away. The ominous waves are represented as an arrowed line
on a graph, pointing downwards. The metaphor we are invited to construe
can be rendered as downward financial chart lines are seismic waves
in the sea. The target is cued by two modalities: the chart line is pictorially

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Figure 1  Peray: ‘Ice Figure 2  Peray: ‘Swiss bailout plan’ Figure 3  Brian Adcock,
Age – The Mortgage (Thailand, 19 Oct. 2008). ‘Scottish leaders’ “Ark of
Meltdown’ (Thailand, prosperity” vision, sunk’
27 Oct. 2008). (Scotland, 19 Oct. 2008).

represented, and its identity is narrowed down to a ‘financial chart line’ by the
caption ‘Financial tsunami’. If we judge that the caption is not necessary for
the identification of target and source – as it probably wasn’t at the time this
cartoon first appeared – this qualifies as a pictorial metaphor. But note that,
without the caption, one could understand the graph-waves more generically as
a ‘monster’. If we take the caption into account, the metaphor verges towards the
verbo-pictorial variety. The source is pictorially represented as a huge threaten-
ing wave, and verbally specified as a ‘tsunami’. The mapping can be formulated
as a ‘high degree of danger and devastating effect’. The metaphor also affects
other elements in the picture, as we are invited to derive banker building
financial empire is child building a sandcastle. This second metaphor
does not belong to the catastrophe/(natural) disaster source domain
and has been categorized under ‘other metaphors’ (see section 3.4). The source
domain is pictorially represented and the target domain is cued by the pictorial
context: another cigar and the dollar symbol on the castle flag. The interpreta-
tion runs something like: ‘The financial crisis is a threat for the bankers’ financial
empires that is as dangerous as a tsunami for human communities.’
Cartoon no. 3, by Peray (Thailand, 19 Oct. 2008), entitled ‘Sarko, Bush
and Barroso’, shows three men on a ladder above a firemen’s car, aiming a hose at
a downward graph that looks like a series of flames. The multimodal metaphor
is clearly downward financial chart line is fire. As in the previous cartoon,
while in October 2008 the image and the caption presumably sufficed to iden-
tify the target, financial crisis, later viewers require the further background
information that at that time a meeting took place between the two EU leaders
Sarkozy and Barroso, and then US President Bush, with the purpose of discussing
solutions to the financial crisis. The mappings from fire to financial crisis are
‘destructive effects’, and ‘fast-growing proportions that are difficult to control’.
Cartoon no. 4 (Manny Francisco, Philippines, 17 Oct. 2008) shows a
man drowning in the upper part of a clepsydra. The water has the inscription
‘financial crisis’. One way of verbalizing the metaphor is victim of finan-
cial crisis is drowning person. The clepsydra adds a time dimension that

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 cannot be captured in the metaphor itself, but could be modelled in a Blending
Theory account (see Fauconnier and Turner, 2002).
In cartoon no. 5, ‘Global Banking Crisis’ (Manny Francisco, Philippines,
17 Oct. 2008), two metaphors occur. The metaphor safety box is block of
concrete is cued exclusively by the pictorial modality, although the verbal
specification ‘banking crisis’ reinforces the financial domain. Please note that
another way of phrasing the metaphor would be: world [in financial crisis]
is a sunken prison ball. The target is pictorially represented and the source is
cued by the pictorial context, the chain that ties the weight to the ball, result-
ing in an MP1/contextual metaphor (Forceville, 1996: 142, 2008: 464). The
interpretation of the metaphor is presumably: ‘global banking crisis is weight
sinking the world’.
Cartoon no. 6 (Manny Francisco, Philippines, 22 Oct. 2008), with the
caption ‘Financial bail out for banks’, represents the crisis of a drowning man
being thrown a lifebuoy by another man, who is himself located in a boat that is
made of a dollar banknote. The metaphor that is to be construed can be verbal-
ized as financial bailout for banks is lifebuoy, or alternatively as financial
help is salvation from death by drowning. That the drowning man is a
metonym for the banks is made clear via the cartoon’s caption. The target is
thus rendered primarily through verbal means, while the source (the lifebuoy) is
visualized, so that the metaphor is multimodal rather than purely pictorial. The
mapped connotation is ‘life-saving instrument’, which guides the intended inter-
pretation as ‘The financial bailout has vital effects for the recovery of the banks.’
The lifebuoy is also the central source concept visualized in cartoon
no. 7 (‘Saved colors’, Petar Pismestrovic, Austria, 20 Oct. 2008). Here the life-
buoy bears the inscription ‘U.S. Congress bailout’, rendering u.s. congress
bailout is lifebuoy. That the man to be saved is a manager is suggested both
by the word written on his back (‘Manager’) and the fact that he is standing
on an underwater bank safe. This spatial layout further specifies in a critical
manner the interpretation of the salvaging metaphor as having the financial
institutions’ leaders as target instead of the financial institutions themselves.
Cartoon no. 8 (Peray: ‘Swiss bailout plan’, Thailand, 19 Oct. 2008,
Figure 2) uses the familiar downward graph as a source domain metaphoriz-
ing the (presumably Swiss) mountains, where climbers take serious risks to
reach summits of mountains. Against this background, we see a St Bernard
rescue dog with a ‘first aid kit’ consisting of a business suitcase instead of the
expected flask with brandy. The suitcase has the Swiss flag where we would
have expected the Red Cross. In combination with the freezing man that lies
close by, we can construe the metaphor Swiss suitcase with money is first
aid kit. The caption ‘Swiss bailout plan’ reinforces the idea that the suitcase
is a metonym for a financial rescue operation, while the freezing man is iden-
tified, via the written text on his suitcase as UBS, a Swiss bank. Taking the
caption into account could also lead to an alternative verbalization of the
metaphor: Swiss bailout is first aid kit. It is to be noted that the former

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verbalization leads to a categorization of the metaphor as pictorial, and the
latter as multimodal. In both varieties – as in the previous cases discussed –
the mapped connotation is ‘necessary for survival’.
Cartoon 9 (Brian Adcock, ‘Scottish leaders’ “ark of prosperity” vision,
sunk’, Scotland, 19 Oct. 2008, Figure 3) shows a wet man with a tie, obvi-
ously having saved himself from the sinking ark in the sea behind him. He
whistles quasi-innocently while another man looks on. Construing the meta-
phor financial crisis is sinking boat depends heavily on the caption. The
caption is a cultural reference to Scotland’s political context and its ambitions
to join the ‘ark of prosperity’, an economic collaboration between Europe’s
northern countries, including Ireland and Scandinavian countries (Maddox,
2009). The connotation mapped from sinking boat to financial crisis is ‘ruin’.
Cartoon no. 10 (‘Economy life boats’, Michael Kountouris, Greece, 15 Oct.
2008) draws on the same metaphor. People in orange life vests are about to
leave a ship in lifeboats while they look at a downward graph on a chart shown
by one of them.

3.2 Source domain: illness/death

In this cluster, we grouped cartoons in which the crisis was understood in
terms of a potentially lethal illness, and of (the risk of) death brought about
by causes other than the forces of nature.
In cartoon no. 11, ‘Financial crisis blame game’ (Manny Francisco,
Philippines, 22 Oct. 2008, Figure 4), the multimodal metaphor dollar is
corpse occurs. The target financial crisis is pictorially represented through
metonymy – the image of the ‘dead’ dollar as depicted on the casket perhaps
itself functioning as a metonym for ‘money’ in general – and the source is
cued by the pictorial, gestural and verbal context, including the yellow tape
inscribed with the text ‘Police: do not cross.’ The image of the men pointing at
one another is a gesture verbally ‘anchored’ (Barthes, 1986[1964]: 28), by the
phrase ‘He did it!’ in the cartoon, and the caption ‘Financial crisis blame game’.
Cartoon no. 12, ‘Krach vulture’ (Peray, Thailand, 24 Oct. 2008) features
the metaphor downward financial chart line is vulture’s head. The
vulture sits on a street sign ‘Wall Street’ – the latter a familiar metonym for the
financial institutions famously located in this area. Pertinent mappable con-
notations of a vulture are that this bird supposedly ‘smells’ imminent death
and feeds on corpses.
Cartoon no. 13 (‘Contamination of the real economy’ (Peray, Thailand,
16 Oct. 2008) shows a white-collar and a blue-collar worker both featuring
symptoms of an illness in the form of a rash on their skins. The metaphor,
whose target is cued verbally, is financial crisis is contagious virus. Since
the blue-collar worker (metonymically representing the caption’s ‘real econ-
omy’) is angry at the other man, who with his suitcase represents the financial
sector, it is clear that the former has been infected by the latter.

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 In cartoon no. 14 (‘Capital injection’, John Trever, The Albuquerque
Journal, 16 Oct. 2008) the multimodal metaphor capital for banks is ille-
gal injection occurs. The target is cued verbally, in the caption ‘capital injec-
tion’ and the amount of money inscribed on the syringe. The source injection
is pictorially represented through the image of the syringe, and verbally cued
in the caption. The pertinent mapping ‘illegal’ is suggested verbally through
the inscription on the medical diploma: ‘Don Corleone School of Medicine’.
The name ‘Don Corleone’ is a cultural reference to the film The Godfather (dir.
Frances Ford Coppola, 1972), which implies the attribute ‘illegality’ associated
with the Italian mafia. Banks are metonymically represented through the man
who is injected. The mappings, illegality and health improvement, guide the
intended interpretation toward ‘illegitimacy of the decision to fund banks’ and
‘vital importance of the capital injection for the health of the banks’.

3.3 Source domain: begging

In this cluster we grouped cartoons in which the need for money (itself a met-
onym for everything one can buy with it) caused by the crisis is presented in
terms of begging for money or food.
Cartoon no. 15 shows a man, Managing Director of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) Dominique Strauss-Kahn, ladling soup from a big sauce-
pan labelled ‘International Monetary Fund’ to three beggars, metonymically
referring to various national governments. The metaphor could be rendered as
imf loans are food for beggars. As in some of the other cartoons, the target
is only accessible through external knowledge, namely the political context of
that time: the fact that several countries applied for IMF help during October
2008. Cartoon no. 16 (‘World bailout vs world hunger’ (Peray, Thailand, 19 Oct.
2008, Figure 5) also exemplifies the money is food metaphor.
Cartoon no. 17 (Manny Francisco, Philippines, 23 Oct. 2008), shows
a begging man with a dollar superimposed over the upper part of his body.

Figure 4  Figure 5  Peray, ‘World bailout vs Figure 6  Joe Heller, ‘State budgets’ (Green
Manny world hunger’ (Thailand, 19 Oct. Bay Press Gazette, 21 Oct. 2008).
Francisco, 2008).
‘Financial crisis
blame game’
(Philippines,
22 Oct. 2008).

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The caption ‘The dollar begging for a dollar’ reinforces the metaphor dol-
lar is beggar. The target is pictorially represented by the placement of the
dollar bill in the place where we would expect the man’s head, and metonymi-
cally by the picture of George Washington on the one-dollar bill. The source
is cued through the pictorial context: the man’s position at the corner of a
street, sitting on the ground, with another well-dressed man wearing a suit
and searching his pockets in front of him. The gesture of holding a can is also
an important cue for the beggar domain. The mappings are ‘being poor’ and
‘asking for charity’.
In cartoon no. 18, ‘Global Financial Crisis’ (Manny Francisco,
Phillippines, 17 Oct. 2008), the metaphor the world (in financial crisis)
is a beggar’s mug can be construed. The target is verbally specified in the
caption and pictorially cued by the pattern of the mug, the map of the world.
The source mug is pictorially rendered and the specification beggar’s mug is
cued by the gesture of holding a mug in which coins are to be thrown.

3.4 Other metaphors

In the analysed sample, there are some metaphors that could not easily be
categorized and are therefore discussed separately.
In cartoon no. 19 (Peray, Thailand, ‘Stock markets rodeo’, 16 Oct. 2008)
we recognize stock market chart line is rodeo horse. The target is picto-
rially represented as chart line, and verbally specified as ‘stock market chart
line’ in the caption of the cartoon. The source rodeo horse is pictorially cued
by the legs and riding equipment. Mappings include ‘dangerous’, ‘unpredict-
able’ and ‘difficult to control’.
Cartoon no. 20 (Michael Kountouris, Greece, ‘Stock market torture’,
26 Oct. 2008) shows the metaphor stock market chart lines are torture
instruments. The target is cued both pictorially and verbally. The source is
activated by the pictorial context, the man on the ground whose arms and legs
are tied as in the draw-and-quarter torture technique. The source torture is
also specified verbally in the caption. The mapped connotations are ‘painful,
torturous, lethal movement’.
In cartoon no. 21, ‘State budgets’ (Joe Heller, Green Bay Press Gazette,
21 Oct. 2008, Figure 6), two related multimodal metaphors can be identified:
financial crisis is Halloween bag and state budget is candy bowl. The
target domains of both metaphors are cued verbally by the inscriptions on the
bag and bowl respectively, and the source domains are pictorially represented.
The highlighted aspect in this metaphor scenario is the greediness with which
the financial institutions ‘shake out’ the state budget. The evil nature of the
action depicted is enhanced through the cultural allusion to the Frankenstein
monster. Although it is difficult to construe the monster as part of a metaphor,
the fact that it holds the ‘financial crisis’ bag metonymically relates it to the
financial crisis domain.

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 4. CONCLUSIONS
Given our small sample and the fact that several cartoonists are overrepre-
sented, we can make no claims for representativeness, nor is this something we
aimed for. We present our findings in the form of tentative conclusions that
invite further theoretical and empirical research.
In the first place, the use of pictorial and multimodal metaphors in
financial crisis cartoons is pervasive; 21 out of the 30 editorial cartoons in our
sample (70%) representing the financial crisis and/or one of its subthemes
deploy metaphor (see Table 1). The frequent use of metaphor to represent
this complex phenomenon can be explained through metaphor’s ability to
‘represent the unknown, unresolved or problematic in terms of something
more familiar and more easily imaginable’ (El Refaie, 2003: 84). It is the genre
as a whole that invites metaphors, not just the topic of the financial crisis. The
pictorial and multimodal metaphors focus on various aspects or subthemes of
the financial crisis, but it is to be noted that in the most frequently occurring
source domain – (natural) disaster – ‘intentionality’ emphatically plays no
role, unless one considers natural disasters to be divine punishments, which
means that the question of who is or might be responsible for the crisis is not
addressed. Thus, by deploying this metaphor, the cartoonists suggest, delib-
erately or subconsciously, that the financial crisis has causes that are beyond
human control. The same holds for cartoon no. 21. The depiction of the crisis
as a threat through the presence of the Frankenstein monster as adversary
is a manner of attributing the causes of the financial crisis to external cir-
cumstances, and of shifting blame for emptying the state budget from human
to supernatural beings. In this context, human beings, as state or financial
sector representatives, are depicted as victims. We suggest that, besides criti-
cally depicting and hyperbolizing the effects of the crisis, the association of the
financial crisis domain with either (natural) disasters or supernatural beings,
such as monsters, reflects popular opinion on the crisis, lack of knowledge, or
an incapacity to identify and understand the causes and workings/develop-
ment of the crisis – at least in October 2008.
Secondly, since, by definition, target and source domains need to be
easily illustrated in order to function in pictorial metaphors (and in multi-
modal metaphors with one pictorial term), they draw heavily on metonyms
(see also Koller, 2009a). To clarify the meaning of this: because an abstract
domain has to be recognized on the basis of visual information alone (i.e.
without help from verbal anchoring), a metonym, or chain of metonyms, from
that domain needs to be chosen that in the given context is: (a) strongly or
even uniquely indicative of the domain; and (b) eminently visualizable. Both
target domain (the financial crisis or one of its subthemes) and source domain
are cued by an object or person that ‘stands for’ the domain as a whole. The
banker or broker stands for the institution, the downward graph stands for a
more complete rendering of a diagram, the dollar sign stands for the financial

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world, etc. Moreover, in the given context, mobile phones, cigars and suitcases
that are accoutrements of the businessman, function – à la the films by Sergei
Eisenstein – as metonyms for this professional: it is thanks to these objects that
we know that a certain figure is not just a man, but a businessman. That is, all
these metonyms have become symbols. It is because these symbols are depict-
able and have a very specific meaning that they can function as targets in pic-
torial metaphor. Clearly, the genre of political cartoons has to rely strongly on
stereotypes to depict (categories of) individuals, objects and events.
Thirdly, many cartoons exemplify a form of personification, if that
trope is broadly defined as a ‘trope in which an inanimate object, animate
non-human, or abstract quality is given human attributes’ (Wales, 2001: 294).
Lakoff and Johnson (1980), who themselves discuss the example inflation
is an adversary, consider personification to be one of the most ubiquitous
types of metaphors, arguing that:

Viewing something as abstract as inflation in human terms has an

explanatory power of the only sort that makes sense to most people.
When we are suffering substantial economic losses due to complex eco-
nomic and political factors that no one really understands, the infla-
tion is an adversary metaphor at least gives us a coherent account of
why we’re suffering these losses. (p. 34)

4.1 Underlying conceptual metaphors?

In order to decide what light our findings shed on Lakoff and Johnson’s meta-
phor theory, we need to answer the following questions: (1) do the cartoons
discussed support the ‘embodied mind’ claim? (2) do the source domains we
identified amount to conceptual domains? and, if so, (3) what is the ‘concep-
tual’ status of the metaphors identified?
In answer to the first question, we believe that this claim is confirmed
by our findings. In the examples, the abstract target domain financial cri-
sis and its subthemes are consistently represented in terms of more con-
crete, ‘embodied’ source domains. What most source domains share is that
they depict situations in which physical well-being or even plain survival is
endangered. Cracks in the ice, tsunamis, fires, shipwrecks, torture, starvation,
rodeos, deprivation, hungry vultures all exemplify scenarios in which the life
or health of one or more human beings is in jeopardy. In less dramatic situa-
tions, the source domain scenario still pertains to the physical realm such as
that of a boy being robbed of his Halloween candy by being held upside down
(cartoon no. 21). However, the embodied aspects of the source domains are
often complemented by socio-cultural knowledge and it is this knowledge that
provides many of the mappings (Forceville et al., 2006: 91). The viewer needs
to be familiar with St Bernard rescue dogs, the Scrat character from Ice Age,
Frankenstein, Noah’s ark, the dollar sign, the businessman stereotype, and a

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 host of other non-embodied, cultural experiences to be able to identify and
interpret the metaphors.
The second question can also be answered affirmatively. The sources
identified are conceptual domains that can be visually or verbo-visually
cued in many different ways, just as there are numerous verbal expressions
that cue a given conceptual domain (see Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, for
­examples).
The third question is more tricky. We have already demonstrated that
there are different ways of verbalizing the metaphors identified; there is thus
no ‘natural’ verbal a is b formula to capture the metaphor’s conceptual level.
In cartoon no. 8 (Figure 2), for instance, Swiss suitcase with money is
first aid kit, banker is avalanche victim, and downward chart line is
mountain contour are all plausible ways of verbalizing the metaphor; and
via the metonym of the Swiss suitcase, we can also postulate Swiss bailout
is first aid kit. But these different verbalizations do not affect the fact that
they are rooted in a single conceptual domain. The source domain depicts
the scenario of a climbing accident taking place in the snow in the Swiss
mountains – which can in turn be labelled a ‘natural disaster’.
Let us consider another example: we could have further subdivided the
begging domain into one in which the victim needs food and one in which
money is requested. But, again, this would be a consequence of the level of
generality at which one chooses to verbalize the metaphors, and it does not
undercut the claim that a single conceptual scenario is at stake: both begging
for food and begging for money exemplify the necessary-for-survival
domain. This does not mean, however, that the verbalization chosen is irrel-
evant: the character on the right in cartoon no. 16 could be said to demand
money, rather than beg for it.
Here is a further example. It is telling that the shipwreck scenario
occurs several times (cartoon nos 6, 7, 9 and 10). This undoubtedly ties in
with the omnipresent x is a journey metaphor, a very pervasive and produc-
tive metaphor (Forceville, 2006b; Katz and Taylor, 2008; Ritchie, 2008), while
verbal metaphors such as the ship of state may play a role here, too. That
is, we could have opted for a subcategory of source domains labelled ship’s
journey.
What these alternatives strongly suggest is, first, that the different
­verbalizations of a domain (both target and source) affect our view of its
conceptual status, and hence how we categorize the conceptual metaphor.
Second, it means that a single cartoon may evoke different ‘underlying’ con-
ceptual metaphors, which may partly overlap. While we think our examples
show that a limited number of source domains are recurrently used to create
metaphors of the financial crisis, they also reveal that the relation between
conceptual metaphors and the way they are verbalized (and hence discussed
in the scholarly literature) is a thorny one, requiring far more sustained
debate.

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Table 1  Frequency of metaphors in the corpus of 30 cartoons

No. of cartoons and %

No metaphors  9 (30%)
Metaphors Conceptual catastrophe/ 12 (48%) 21 (70%)
metaphor natural
source domain disaster
scenario illness/death   4 (16%)
begging   4 (16%)
Other source   5 (20%)
domains
Total 25

5. ISSUES FOR FURTHER REFLECTION AND

RESEARCH
In this final section we want briefly to raise some issues that require further
thought and theorization.
In the first place, even adhering to the guiding principle of formulating
visually represented terms in the metaphorical a is b formula in maximally
concrete terms still leaves room for many different verbalizations. When there
is no linguistic anchoring, it is for instance unclear whether a certain man is
best called a banker, a stockbroker, or a businessman – a choice which may
affect our interpretation of a metaphor. There thus appear to be two strategies.
One is to focus primarily on the visual modality and aim as much as possible
for a verbalization of the concrete noun a is concrete noun b variety –
and then see how, in Barthes’ (1986[1964]) terminology, the verbal modality
‘anchors’ the metaphor (if it only qualifies information already present in the
visual modality) or ‘relays’ it (if the source domain is exclusively present in the
verbal modality). The other strategy is to take into account the verbal modal-
ity (if present) straightaway and take this as co-labelling the target domain.
A second issue is how much historical and/or socio-cultural knowledge
is needed at a given time for a viewer–reader to understand the cartoons. At
the point in time at which the cartoons appeared, the central concept finan-
cial crisis was presumably so foremost in everybody’s mind that hardly any
verbal cues were necessary for understanding the metaphors – which for this
reason could be argued to be pictorial metaphors. But it may well be that, at
some future moment, this historical knowledge is no longer readily available
to a viewer, in which case the verbal information may be indispensable for
identification of the metaphor’s target domain. In such a case, the very same
metaphor would have to be called multimodal. Socio-cultural factors may also
affect contemporary audiences. Somebody unfamiliar with Ice Age, rodeos, or
the meaning of the downward graph may be unable to construe the metaphor
in some of the cartoons discussed (for more on the cultural dimension of
metaphor, see, e.g., Charteris-Black, 2004; Kövecses, 2005; Yu, 1998).

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 A third question, already addressed in section 4, is how pictorial and
multimodal metaphors relate to verbal and conceptual metaphors. The struc-
tural metaphor downward financial market movement is (natural)
disaster, for instance, has been found to underlie several surface linguis-
tic metaphors related to other financial crises as well (Charteris-Black and
Ennis, 2001: 258) and thus appears to be a common source domain for crises.
Moreover, several of the multimodal metaphors with at least the source rep-
resented pictorially, such as the metaphor that has tsunami as source domain
(cartoon no. 2), have also occurred in verbal reports about the current financial
crisis. The metaphor ‘once in a century credit tsunami’ used by former Federal
Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to refer to the crisis of the global finan-
cial markets projects the following mappings upon the crisis: ‘large propor-
tions’, ‘devastating effects’, ‘leading to great financial losses’ (BBC News video,
‘Financial crisis “like a tsunami”’, 23 Oct. 2008). This is of course completely
in line with the CMT tenet that we think metaphorically, and hence find man-
ifestations of conceptual metaphors in different modalities. However, scep-
tics might argue that pictorial and multimodal metaphors are translations of
verbal metaphors rather than direct manifestations of conceptual metaphors.
This is a very important issue: if it could be demonstrated that all non-verbal
and multimodal metaphors are ultimately simply derived from verbal ones,
the whole CMT claim that we ‘live by metaphors’ – rather than only speak
and write by them – collapses. This question cannot be answered here, but
we submit that even if pictorial and multimodal metaphors should be found
to be completely parasitic on verbal ones, the multimodal medium of car-
toons affords the representation of aspects not available to exclusively verbal
texts (see Koller, 2005: 138). These aspects often correspond to the cartoon-
ist’s critical perspective on financial key figures as an attempt to undermine
their legitimacy. Irresponsibility, selfishness and greed are connotations that
are associated with financial leaders by means of metaphors such as banker
building financial empire is child building sand castle and banker is
scrat the squirrel. The ridiculing stance of political cartoonists is strongly
enhanced by, or even completely resides in, pictorial elements and exaggera-
tions that do not bear simple translation into words. As Seymour-Ure (1986)
argues: ‘the comments and insults conveyed by the graphic imagery of a car-
toon have a crudity and offensiveness that might well be unacceptable if spelt
out in words’ (cited in Buell and Maus, 1988: 847).
A fourth matter is how a pictorial or multimodal metaphor inter-
acts with other metaphors, other tropes, or non-tropical aspects of an image
(e.g. colour, layout, style of representation) to achieve its rhetorical effects. It
should never be forgotten that a representation seldom is a metaphor; rather,
it contains elements that invite or force the viewer–reader to construe a meta-
phor. Even when the metaphor is the central device for communicating the
satirical message, there are usually other, non-metaphorical elements that play
a role in the overall effect.

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 A fifth matter for further reflection is the status of those pictorial ele-
ments we have called ‘symbols’: the downward graph, the dollar sign, the
mobile phone-cum-suitcase-cum-cigar have fixed meanings that distinguish
them from most visually represented phenomena inasmuch as their connota-
tive meaning is relatively independent of context (famous brand logos form
another such category; see Koller, 2009b). That is, although these elements are
realistically, usually metonymically, motivated, due to their degree of ‘coded-
ness’ they hover between Peircean ‘icon’ and Peircean ‘symbol’. Such strongly
coded visuals (logos, national flags, many pictograms) require very little, if
any, verbal context, or verbal anchoring, to cue pertinent connotations, and
thus have ‘language-like’ properties (one could compile a thesaurus of them).
Further investigating these ‘symbols’, which might benefit from art-historical
research, will further help assess their special place in multimodal research.
More research can also be devoted to potentially patterned differences
between metaphors in different regions. For example, in countries lying in
a mountain area, such as Switzerland, freezing on top of a mountain is pre-
sented as a typical metaphorical threat to life, while sinking is more likely to
be employed with the same purpose in countries bordering the sea such as the
Philippines.
In this article, we have shown that political cartoons pertaining to the
global crisis rely heavily on pictorial and multimodal metaphors, and that
these are rooted in conceptual metaphors. We also explained how we dealt
with various methodological problems we encountered in our analyses.
Hopefully, this will encourage the further theorization of multimodal meta-
phor, in particular, and multimodal discourse, in general, and how they both
relate to cognition.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank an anonymous reviewer of Visual Communication and, particularly,
Veronika Koller, for insightful comments on an earlier version of this article.
The responsibility for all mistakes, analyses and arguments remains of course
entirely with the authors.

NOTES
1. All this is commensurate with the Relevance Theory Model (Sperber
and Wilson, 1995; Forceville, 2005) but we will not expand here on
this theoretical background since its endorsement is not necessary for
acceptance of our argument.
2. If a colour and b/w version were both presented, we took into
account the colour version (for all the cartoons, see http://www.
politicalcartoons.com/search.aspx?cmd=4&mode=Advanced&query
=financial+crisis&from=10%2f15%2f2008&to=10%2f31%2f2008&a
rtist=&type=0, last accessed 11 November 2009).

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 3. Note that the fact that the graphic ‘downward chart line’ (similar to
the word ’downward’) can already be considered metaphoric (bad is
down) does not prevent it from being used here and in other examples
as a target domain in another metaphor.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
LILIANA BOUNEGRU is a Research MA student in the Media Studies
Department of the University of Amsterdam. She works on new media and
digital culture, specifically the intersections between news media and the digi-
tal environment of open data. She has published on the potential of contem-
porary interactive media art projects employing urban screens to generate
meaningful individual engagement and agency.

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Address: University of Amsterdam, Department of Media Studies,
Turfdraagsterpad 9, 1012 XT Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [email: liliana.
bounegru@gmail.com]

CHARLES FORCEVILLE studied English language and literature. Currently,

he is Associate Professor in the University of Amsterdam’s Media Studies
Department. After publishing Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising (Routledge,
1996), his scholarly interests broadened to multimodal metaphor in various
media and genres. Considering the structure and rhetoric of multimodal
discourse his core business, he attempts to be a cognition scholar in the
humanities. Forceville serves on the advisory boards of Metaphor and Symbol,
the Journal of Pragmatics, Atlantis and the Public Journal of Semiotics. He
co-edited, with Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, Multimodal Metaphor (Mouton de
Gruyter, 2009). His teaching and research concerns include documentary film,
metaphor, animation, comics and cartoons, and advertising. In 2010–11 he
taught the course ‘Narrative across Media’ at Amsterdam University College.
His online Course in Pictorial and Multimodal Metaphor can be accessed at
http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/semiotics/cyber/cyber.html
Address: as Liliana Bounegru. [c.j.forceville@uva.nl]

Bounegru and Forceville: Metaphors in editorial cartoons 229

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