Is it ok to say political caricatures instead of political cartoons in visual and multimodal metaphor?
I am afraid you cannot because they are different
Shatha Naiyf Qaiwer College of Education for Women-English dep. Baghdad University Thanks
Hayder Tuama Jasim Al-Saedi I agree with Shatha Naiyf Qaiwer College of Education for Women-English dep. Baghdad University . Of course politicians are often depicted caricaturally in political cartoons, but the cartoon genre primarily wants to convey a critical, humorous message -- and caricatures may be, but need not, be part of this. Caricatures are, in my view, standalone depictions that exaggerate certain facial and other bodily features of a person, perhaps accompanied by some telling "props" to aid recognizability, but they do not necessarily make political statements.
Yes, it is possible but you would need to specify what you mean by caricature as it has no one fixed meaning. Often people relate the history of political cartooning by placing its roots in the practice of caricature (the practice of exaggerating facial features which began in Italy). Also satirical prints of the 18th and 19th century, which are political cartoons, tend to be called caricatures regardless of whether there are any caricatured likenesses of people or not. So when some people use the word caricature to talk about political cartoons they are doing it to locate them historically. Nevertheless, if you look over the literature on political cartoon of the last century you can find plenty of people (academics and in the popular media), who use the terms "caricature" and "political cartoons" interchangeably. This is why Gombrich in his famous essay, "the Cartoonists' Armory" (1963) needed to qualify caricature as "portrait caricature" to make it clear what he was talking about. The Encyclopedia Britannica in its account of cartooning history (probably penned quite a few decades ago) uses the term "political caricature" as an equivalent of "political cartoon (https://www.britannica.com/art/caricature-and-cartoon/Comedies-of-manners-the-cartoon). Though the use caricature to mean political cartoon is becoming less frequent these days, you can still find it. While I use it to caricature, just as Charles above, to mean exaggeration of facial or other physical features (so a tool of a cartoonist rather than being a political cartoon), but one of my coauthors of a recent survey (meta analysis) of political cartoon papers (about 140 papers) who is a scholar of literature, also, I discovered used "caricature" to mean "political cartoon" as did quite a number of the papers we surveyed. So it can be a slippery term. In some fields though the term is quite fixed in meaning exaggeration of facial features (as in the Italian origins). One area is practitioners, ie caricaturists, who work at fairs, in parks, do caricatures for weddings and other events, and who even hold large competitions (some international). Another group is researchers of facial recognition from cognitive science and computer science. Also the wikipedia entry for Caricature talks about it in this way (at least in English).
So once again, yes you can use "caricature" to mean "political cartoon" but you need to make explicit the way you are using the term at the beginning of a paper, or talk, because you can't assume everyone will understand it the same way.
Political cartooning is founded on caricatures, a technique picking us up to Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches.
Charles Forceville's remark seems to me as inspiring as can be. Political caricature, as a form of humor communication, borrows something from the visual structure of political banners, projecting certain features of the political character through the image, of course exacerbating them to be easily recognizable. On the other hand, in political cartoons, the reality effect of the animated film naturalizes and somehow insidiously gives way to the message, the verbal content.