He Will Be Gulliver in the Hands of the Brobdingnagians

Thomas Nast's political cartoon uses Swift's *Gulliver's Travels* as metaphor for post-Reconstruction anxieties. A Southern figure holds a tiny Union soldier. Text boxes present competing Southern positions on war debt and Union soldiers—visual rhetoric capturing fractious debate. The cartoon exemplifies how 19th-century periodical illustration deployed literary allusion and caricature as political argument, establishing techniques later central to comic strips: sequential text, visual hierarchy, and symbolic characterization. Nast's work in weekly publications pioneered the visual language newspapers would systemize into the comics medium by century's end.