Vanity Fair, Vol. 6, No. 155

This cover of the British satirical weekly features a caricatured political figure—Horatio Seymour—leaning over a fence in an exaggerated pose. The grotesque portraiture exemplifies Victorian graphic satire's reliance on facial distortion and physical caricature, practices endemic to nineteenth-century popular print. Penny dreadfuls and similar cheap serials of this era thrived on sensational woodcut illustrations paired with serialized narratives of crime, melodrama, and working-class scandal. These publications, sold for a penny or two, reached audiences excluded from respectable literature, establishing a direct lineage to modern comic books through their integration of image and text, their episodic format, and their appetite for violent and transgressive subject matter aimed at mass consumption.