Puck's Review of the Past Year

Joseph Keppler wraps 1884 into a single chromolithograph by sending the cherubic Puck striding forward, trailing an enormous ribbon-scroll whose looping panels summarize the year's political crises. Labeled scenes include the British Lion menaced by El Mahdi in Egypt and Sudan; a battered Tammany tiger; James G. Blaine's collapsed presidential bid; Chester Arthur's rise; Jay Gould and William H. Vanderbilt labeled as millionaires; and Grover Cleveland linking arms with the Independent vote. The French-Chinese conflict in Tonkin appears with caricatured Asian figures rendered in the flat, exaggerated shorthand Puck routinely applied to non-European peoples—a convention that reflected and reinforced nativist assumptions common to illustrated press of the period. Keppler's pen doubles as Puck's lance, asserting the magazine's self-image as satirical arbiter of American public life.