World War 1: What would a war be without its cartoons?

Punch Cartoon

The Great War was dominated by two satirical papers; Punch and the journal best known by it's original name, The Wipers Times. Punch magazine was a well-established journal comparable in style and content to today's Private Eye. It had a wide circle of distribution and was recognised by the British Nation as a middle-class and supposedly unbiased account of current affairs.

The Wipers Times took its name for the army slang for Ypres, where it was first produced. It emulated Punch, but contained a more specific type of comedy relating exclusively to the soldiers on the Western Front. The practicalities of trench warfare had created a sudden and often uncomfortable closeness between classes, and therefore The Wipers Times targeted a far wider audience class wise, despite it's relatively limited circulation.

The two papers had many similarities, the greatest being that they shared the same ethos. Both believed that comedy should be employed in a cathartic role against the tension, fear and grief caused by the fighting. However, both dramatically diverge in outlook, contents, the ideas they pursued and the ways in which these ideas were expressed and laid out within each paper.

Yes, testable!

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