How We Conceptualize Epidemic--Visual Metaphors of COVID-19 in Editorial Cartoons

Abstract

Since 2020, the whole world has been busy in fighting against a new invisible enemy: COVID-19. As a public health emergency of international concern, COVID-19 has become the focus of media attention at home and abroad. War-related terminology is commonly used in news to frame the discourse around epidemics and diseases. The current study presents an analysis of the visual metaphor of COVID-19 in 24 editorial cartoons from China Daily. The conceptual and framing of the metaphors are conducted. The study finds that the metaphors in editorial cartoons evoke a general understanding of COVID-19 problem by activating the war scenario and this particular way of framing help to establish people's confidence and make them work together. The study further affirms that visual metaphors are better in conveying rich and implicit conceptual and affective meaning, and can be direct manifestation of the conceptual metaphor without the mediation of language.

Pak–India relations: A comparative analysis of political cartoons

“…Omanga (2014) conducted a frame analysis to study the raid at Abbottabad and Terrorist Almighty in the editorial cartoons of the Kenyan press. Likewise Xiao and Li (2021) conducted a frame analysis of editorial cartoons regarding Covid-19 and conceptualization of the epidemic. The sources for this research comprised two newspapers, DAWN (from Pakistan) and the Times of India (from India).…”

(De-)Monstering COVID-19: a diachronic study of COVID-19 virus multimodal metaphors in Philippine editorial cartoons, 2019–2022

“…Studies have been made, for example, on the metaphors used to frame and describe COVID-19 in newspaper articles, e.g., Cruz (2020), and social media posts, e.g., Colak (2022). In a similar vein, COVID-19-related multimodal metaphors have also been studied descriptively in Chinese editorial cartoons, e.g., Xiao and Li (2021), Chu (2022), Wang (2021), and Spanish ones, e.g., Filardo-Llamas (2021). What these studies reveal, however, is the lack of literature focusing on more nuanced and localized Philippine contexts with a specifically diachronic perspective.…”