ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Herbarium Specimen: Cordia superba Cham.

· Collected 1838; mounted for systematic botanical record

Herbarium Specimen: Cordia superba Cham.
This is a pressed and mounted herbarium specimen of *Cordia superba* Cham. (family Boraginaceae), not a political cartoon or caricature. The sheet displays dried leaves and a flowering or fruiting stem arranged for taxonomic study, with collection labels, an institutional barcode, and a color-calibration strip used in archival photography. No satirical figures, printmaking technique, or caricature tradition applies here. This object belongs to the history of natural history illustration and specimen science — a tradition running parallel to, but distinct from, the Hogarth-to-Nast lineage of print satire from which comics descend. Producing a fabricated wall label would misrepresent the artifact. A curatorial label for this object should address Chamisso's botanical taxonomy and nineteenth-century collecting practices instead.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/