Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan!

Thomas Nast's political cartoon appeared in Harper's Weekly, the era's leading illustrated newspaper. Using sequential imagery and allegorical characters, Nast depicts a winged demon labeled "Free Love" tempting a woman representing virtue or the social order. Nast pioneered the visual syntax of modern comics—panel borders, expressive line work, symbolic gestures—to communicate narrative and argument to mass audiences. Though his illustrations lack the speech balloons and recurring characters of later comics, they established how sequential images could tell stories and shape public opinion in the Sunday pages that preceded the comic strip's formal birth.