The Blue Devils — !!

A dejected man slumps in an armchair beside a cold, cheerless grate while a swarm of small blue devils — winged, clawed, grimacing — clamber over his body, tug his hair, whisper in his ear, and cavort across his floor. Books lie scattered; bills are pinned to the mantel; framed pictures on the wall show further scenes of chaos and torment. The title phrase was contemporary slang for depression or low spirits, and Cruikshank renders the inner state as literal infestation. The hand-coloured etching sits squarely in the rowdy British print-satire tradition running from Hogarth's moral series through Gillray's political grotesques and Rowlandson's social comedies — work sold cheaply in London shop windows and passed hand to hand. That tradition of sequential, exaggerated figure-drawing in cheap printed form is the direct ancestor of the comic strip and comic book.