A French Hail Storm — or — Neptune Loosing Sight of the Brest Fleet

James Gillray's hand-colored etching depicts a rotund Neptune — caricatured with the bloated, gold-buttoned excess Gillray reserved for British admiralty — straddling a wave-tossed hat-island, trident raised, the British union flag clutched in one fist while cherub-headed hailstones pelt him from a French-directed cloud. Severed heads bob at his feet; the Brest Fleet retreats in the background. The speech bubble rails against storms hindering duty. Gillray, working for publisher Hannah Humphrey, perfected the grotesque physiognomy and dense visual metaphor that defined Georgian print satire — a tradition running from Hogarth's moral sequences through Rowlandson and across to Daumier and Nast. This lineage of single-image sequential storytelling and numbered speech bubbles fed directly into the comic strip and, eventually, the comic book page.