Employing data from the Egyptian public discourse on the U.S., this paper drafts the foundation for constructing a general theory of pictorial framing. At the most general level, the concept of pictorial framing refers to subtle alterations in the visual presentation of judgment and choice problems. Specifically, pictures are viewed as constructions, and pictorial meaning is seen as a complex web of linked frames. The paper thus adopts the position that a visual grammar is part of cognitive science and is essentially concerned with the relation between what goes on in the human mind and manifestations of this activity. The paper uses insights from blending model (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002), Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) and frame semantics (Fillmore, 1985), debating a large corpus of 90 multimodal cartoons on the US.