Kssssse! Pédro — Ksssse! Ksssse! Miguel!

A hand-colored lithograph by Honoré Daumier, published in Charles Philipon's combative Paris journal La Caricature. Two puppet-like figures — caricatures of Dom Pedro and Dom Miguel, rival claimants to the Portuguese throne — are shown kneeling on a beach, their oversized heads and shrunken bodies a technique Daumier used to mock political pretension. Behind each crouches a manipulator, one in a bourgeois top hat, one in military dress, pulling strings. The caption's hissing onomatopoeia mocks both men as cowards. Daumier inherits the grotesque physiognomic distortion of Gillray and Rowlandson but channels it through French lithography's reproductive speed and mass reach — the direct ancestor of the sequential comic page.