The Head Ache

A well-dressed gentleman slumps in an armchair, mouth agape in agony, while a troupe of small demons drill, hammer, and saw directly into his skull. The figures are rendered in the grotesque idiom of popular print satire — spindly, leering imps borrowed from folk-devil iconography, here pressed into service as comic metaphor for migraine. Cruikshank's etching line is crisp and economical; the hand-applied colour pops the blue coat against the green chair. The image descends directly from Gillray and Rowlandson's tradition of embodied affliction made legible through caricature — pain given theatrical, exaggerated form rather than clinical description. That tradition of sequential visual comedy, single-panel or otherwise, fed directly into the narrative picture-sheets and, eventually, the modern comic book's visual language of impact and sensation.