War with Spain!! or John Bull and the Regent of Portugal, versus Ferdinand, and his Marvelous Monk!!!

A rotund, ruddy-faced John Bull in British military scarlet thrusts a sword toward Ferdinand VII of Spain, who cowers beneath a bishop's cross while a monk whispers threats of excommunication. Portugal's regent and his retinue crowd the right. The speech bubbles — a device Cruikshank's generation normalized before the comic strip formalized it — carry the cartoon's argument: Britain will defend Portugal, its old ally, against Spanish clerical interference. The ethnic caricature is period-typical: Ferdinand reads as effeminate and craven, the monk as scheming and fat. Robert Cruikshank, younger brother of George, trained in the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of hand-colored political etching — the direct ancestor of the sequential narrative art the comic book would later inherit.