The German Invasion

Tom Merry's colored wood engraving depicts a British family observing a procession of German workers arriving with banners and flags. The composition contrasts the family's alarm—rendered with sharp features and anxious postures—against the advancing foreign laborers, who carry socialist and trade union emblems. Descended from Gillray and Rowlandson's 18th-century satirical prints, the wood-engraved technique was popularized in broadsheets and newspapers. This visual rhetoric—combining class anxiety and nationalist sentiment—became a standard vocabulary for comic illustration and early comic strips, establishing conventions that persisted well into the 20th century.