Gog Extricating Xit from the Bear in the Lions Tower

George Cruikshank's wood-engraved illustration depicts a dramatic rescue inside the Tower of London's menagerie: the giant warder Gog tears the boy Xit from a bear's grip while a swordsman moves to assist and courtiers watch from an upper gallery, caged animals lurking in arched recesses behind iron bars. The scene illustrates William Harrison Ainsworth's historical novel *The Tower of London* (1840), for which Cruikshank produced the plates. It belongs to the great British print-satire lineage—Hogarth's sequential moral narratives, Gillray's grotesque political caricature, Rowlandson's ribald social comedy—that Cruikshank absorbed and redirected toward popular illustrated fiction. That lineage of sequenced, captioned images explaining story through picture is precisely the ancestor from which the comic strip and comic book descend.