Armed Forces

In March 1877, on the eve of the Russo-Turkish War, a British civil servant who did caricatures on the side drew a map that rendered the Russian Empire as a horned octopus, with its tentacles wrapping around Poland, Finland, Crimea, Bulgaria, and Persia — all illustrated as recognizable people. The German emperor, William I, is seen pushing back on an encroaching limb, while others are caught somewhere between alarm and indifference. “The Frenchman, remembering his late defeat, is carefully examining his weapons,” an inset legend explains. “Spain is taking his much required rest.”

Hugely popular, Fred Rose’s Serio-Comic War Map established a trope that politically charged pictorial maps proceeded to copy with abandon. In 1899, the League for Social Service called out the “ecclesiastical despotism” of the Church of Latter-day Saints with a black octopus enveloping much of the American West. Five years later, a student at Keio University in Japan basically...