ON AN ENTIRELY unremarkable day, in between posts about a baby announcement and a poorly disguised business launch, Instagram inexplicably suggests that I follow @szpilkimagazine. It’s an account that, since March 2021, has been uploading scans of European satirical cartoons from the ’60s through ’80s. At the time of writing, the account has over 38,000 followers and more than 4,500 posts. It’s a rolodex of transgressive and bewildering images. They’re occasionally violent: a man tries to hang himself from a tree branch, but the noose snaps – he falls and drowns instead. Sometimes, they’re classically surrealist: one is styled after Magritte’s The Son of Man (1964), but instead of an apple, the man’s face is replaced by an open cabinet, revealing an egg in an eggcup. Often, they’re sexual: a woman is shown from the waist down; she spreads her legs, revealing Prince’s face in place of her vulva. The singer’s curls stand in for the woman’s shock of pubic hair.

The null hypothesis for these images could simply be that they’re funny because they’re silly. Consider the illustration of a baby wearing boxing gloves, leaning over the corner of its crib like a little prize fighter in the ring. But it seems to me that many of these images are trying to agitate towards a certain, if sometimes opaque, politics. In one illustration, a pair of breasts – with fins like those seen on the Fat Man bomb – fall from the sky. In the distance, a town is visible. In another, a woman in a one-piece bathing suit reclines by a lake as a hypersonic missile lands precisely between her thighs.