Humor and war. Comics and cartoons in the newspaper Clarín during the Falklands (Malvinas) conflict

Abstract

The year 1982 started in Argentina in the midst of a major crisis of the military regime that prompted the military to use the old conflict with Great Britain over the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands, as a vehicle to mobilize the consensus of society and silencing the growing discontent that had started to be expressed including massive public demonstrations. In this article we shall deal with the behavior of graphic humor in the Clarín newspaper (then the paper of higher national circulation and expressed the common sense of the middle class) in the context of the conflict with Great Britain with the aim of demonstrating that this was a vehicle that was used to express, from the particular point of view and rules of the genre, the main topics of the official discourse and to participate in the nationalistic euphoria elicited by the “recovery” of the island, as well as to enable, within the boundaries of such space, the emergence of other points of view, from a minority and relatively marginal, which opened a space for a critical distance from the military government.