Colonel Blimp

Colonel Blimp is a British cartoon character by cartoonist David Low, first drawn for Lord Beaverbrook's London Evening Standard in April 1934.

Low claimed that he developed the character after overhearing two military men in a Victorian-style Turkish bath declare that cavalry officers should be entitled to wear their spurs inside tanks.

[12] In a 2006 book, historian Christopher Clark used the term "blimpish" to characterise the Prussian Field Marshal von Mollendorf (1724–1816), who distinguished himself as an officer in the Seven Years' War but whose conservatism and opposition to military reform were considered to have contributed to Prussia's defeat in the Battle of Jena in 1806.

[13] In his review of Garner's Modern American Usage, David Foster Wallace referred to the "Colonel Blimp's rage" of prescriptivist journalists like William Safire.

[14] The graphic novel series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which depicts numerous literary characters interacting with each other, includes Horatio Blimp as an overconfident major of the British army who commands the initial strike against the Martians of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.

[citation needed] In 1943, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger wrote, produced, and directed the motion picture The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).

The story encouraged the audience to accept that although the officer was honorable, with time his opinions had become outdated, and that winning a modern war required irregular means.