Ted Rall

Frederick Theodore Rall III[2] was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1963, and raised in Kettering, Ohio, near Dayton. He graduated from Fairmont West High School, in 1981. From 1981 to 1984, Rall attended Columbia University's engineering school, where he contributed cartoons to the campus newspapers, including the Columbia Daily Spectator, Barnard Bulletin, and the Jester. He failed to complete his studies in the engineering school, where he majored in applied physics and nuclear engineering, but returned to graduate several years later from Columbia's School of General Studies in 1991 with a bachelor of arts, with honors, in history.[3]

Rall says his drawing style was originally influenced by Mike Peters, the editorial cartoonist at his hometown paper, the Dayton Daily News. Later influences included Jules Feiffer, Garry Trudeau, Charles M. Schulz, and Matt Groening.

Rall's 1990s work focused on the issues and concerns surrounding twentysomethings and Generation X, terms coined in the late 1980s to describe people born from the early to mid 1960s to the mid 1980s. While living in San Francisco Rall met Dave Eggers, who hired him as a contributing editor and writer for Might magazine, a publication Eggers edited and co-founded. Among other essays, Rall authored two seminal essays for Might, "Confessions of an Investment Banker" and "College is for Suckers." He wrote op-ed columns for The New York Times, including "Why I Will Not Vote" (1994), which justified apathy among Generation Xers who saw neither Democrats nor Republicans responding to their concerns. In 1998 Rall published "Revenge of the Latchkey Kids", a compendium of essays and cartoons that criticized the Baby Boomer-dominated media for ignoring and ridiculing young adults and their achievements.

Rall's cartoons have been handled by San Francisco Chronicle Features, no longer in business, and—since 1996—by Universal Press Syndicate.[4]

Rall's cartoons have appeared regularly in Rolling Stone, Time, Fortune and Men's Health magazines, as well as Mad magazine (for which he also wrote) and were for several years the most reproduced cartoons in The New York Times.

Rall began frequent travels to Central Asia in 1997, when he attempted to drive the Silk Road from Beijing to Istanbul via China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan as a staff writer for P.O.V. magazine. P.O.V. published his adventures as Silk Road to Ruin, a title he used for his 2006 collection of essays and cartoons about Central Asia. Rall returned to the region for POV in 1999 to travel the Karakoram Highway from Kashgar, in western China, to Islamabad. Subsequent trips included two trips in 2000, "Stan Trek 2000"—in which Rall brought along 23 listeners to his radio show for a bus journey from Turkmenistan to Kyrgyzstan via Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan—and a U.S. State Department-sponsored visit to Turkmenistan, where he met with Turkmen college students and dissidents to explain the nature of free press in a democracy. A 2002 assignment for Gear magazine to cover the world championships of buzkashi in Tajikistan was not published due to the magazine's going out of business, but turned up in an edited form in Silk Road to Ruin. He returned to Tajikistan, Xinjiang Province in western China and Pakistan during the summer of 2007.

The Attitude: The New Subversive Cartoonists series of books is a series of anthologies of alternative comics edited by Rall. Frustrated that cartoons prevalent in alternative weekly newspapers were being ignored in favor of mainstream and art comics, Rall edited the first "Attitude" anthology, Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists, in 2002, with its mission to bring together cartoonists who were "too alternative for the mainstream and too mainstream for the alternative." Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists followed in 2004, and in 2006 Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists appeared. Each volume contains interviews with, cartoons by and personal ephemera related to 21 different cartoon creators. The first and second volumes emphasized political and humor cartoons; the third volume exclusively features web cartoonists.

Rall also edited three cartoons collections by Andy Singer, Neil Swaab, and Stephanie McMillan under the name "Attitude Presents:".

From 2006 to 2009, Rall was editor of Acquisitions and Development at the comic strip syndicate United Media. While there, he helped bring to syndication Keith Knight's The Knight Life, Signe Wilkinson's Family Tree, Tak Toyoshima's Secret Asian Man, Dan Thompson's Rip Haywire, and Richard Stevens' Diesel Sweeties.[5]

Rall's work includes the book The Anti-American Manifesto (Seven Stories Press), published in September 2010.[6] His book, The Book of Obama: From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt (Seven Stories Press) was released in July 2012.[7]

A panel from a Ted Rall cartoon satirizing Antonin Scalia's remark that he saw nothing wrong with "slapping" terrorism suspects.

In 2009 Rall called for Barack Obama to resign as President of the United States, because "the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama's inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through."[10] He endorsed Jill Stein in the 2016 presidential election.[11]

In December 2016, Rall presented what he called a "manifesto" to "topple Trumpism."[12] Less than a year and a half later, however, he predicted "that Mr. Trump would not only finish his term but win re-election, due to the divisions within the Democratic Party."[13]

Rall is an atheist and writes some cartoons dealing with these views.[14]

In 1999, Rall wrote an article in The Village Voice[15] accusing Maus creator Art Spiegelman of lacking talent and controlling who gets high-profile assignments from magazines such as The New Yorker through personal connections, including his wife, New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly. In retaliation for Rall's piece, New York Press illustrator Danny Hellman sent two sets of e-mails under the name "Ted Rall's Balls" to at least 35 cartoonists and editors, including Rall's employers. After Rall tracked down Hellman's identity, Hellman ignored Rall's cease-and-desist letters. After several weeks, Rall filed a $1.5-million lawsuit for libel per se, libel per quod, injurious falsehood, violation of civil rights, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Rall's suit stated that Hellman was attempting to sabotage his career. Four of Rall's five claims were dismissed, leaving libel per se.[16] The lawsuit remains unresolved.

In a Rall cartoon from May 3, 2004,[17] Pat Tillman (a former Arizona Cardinals player who abandoned his NFL career to enlist in the United States Army Rangers and was killed in Afghanistan) is depicted asking an Army recruiter, "Never mind the fine print. Will I get to kill Arabs?" The narrator points out that he was killed and the reader is then given a choice: "idiot," "sap," or "hero." Later, after Tillman's anti–Iraq War sentiments and the friendly fire circumstances of his death became public, Rall wrote that he regretted making such sweeping assumptions about Tillman's motives, describing Tillman as "one hell of an interesting human being."[18]

A November 8, 2004, cartoon[19] depicted mentally disabled children as classroom teachers in an attempt to make an analogy to American voters who reelected President George W. Bush, drawing complaints from advocates for the disabled and led to his cartoons being dropped from The Washington Post's website. Rall responded in his blog saying: "I regret hurting people who I have nothing against. I do want to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and I think I failed in that with this cartoon. Not to mention that the cartoon failed—too many people got bogged down in the analogy and the main point got lost."

On October 22, 2007, Rall published a cartoon saying "Over time, however, the endless war in Iraq began to play a role in natural selection. Only idiots signed up; only idiots died. Back home, the average I.Q. soared." That caused an uproar by military supporters both conservative and liberal alike.[20]

Rall is listed at #15 in Bernard Goldberg's book 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America as a "vicious, conspiracy-minded, hate-filled jerk". Rall perceived the listing as an honor, replying, "Not only am I grouped with many people whom I admire for their achievements and patriotism, I'm being demonized by McCarthyite thugs I despise."[21]

Rall solicited funds from readers and left-wing bloggers while considering whether to sue Ann Coulter for libel and slander for her (later self-described as "joking") statement that, "Iran is soliciting cartoons on the Holocaust. So far, only Ted Rall, Garry Trudeau, and The New York Times have made submissions." Coulter first made the remark at the 2006 Conservative Political Action Conference meeting in Washington, D.C., on February 10 and then printed it in her syndicated column the following week. By 18 days later, pledges totaled over $21,000.[22][23] However, pledges are no longer being solicited, and in a December 27, 2006 blog entry, Rall posted an email that was sent to pledged contributors to the lawsuit, stating that his attorneys had determined, "The road ahead is too uncertain to justify spending thousands of dollars of pledges, not to mention my own money".[24]

• 1995: Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award
• 1996: Finalist, Pulitzer Prize
• 1997: First Prize, Firecracker Alternative Press Award, for "Real Americans Admit: The Worst Thing I've Ever Done!"
• 1997: First Prize, Deadline Club Award, Society of Professional Journalists
• 2000: Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award
• 2001: Amazon's Best Books of the Year, for "2024: A Graphic Novel"
• 2002: Best Book of the Year, American Library Association, for "To Afghanistan and Back"
• 2002: James Aronson Award for Social Justice Graphics
• 2007: Second Prize, Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Awards [38]
• 2007: Second Prize, Lambda Legal's "Life Without Fair Courts" cartoon contest[39]
• 2008: Ohioana Citation for Art and Journalism
• 2010: Scripps Howard National Journalism Award, Finalist [40]
• 2011: First Prize, Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Awards [41]

• Matt Bors - another cartoonist who has collaborated with Rall
• List of newspaper columnists

Wikiquote has quotations related to Ted Rall.

• Official website
• Interview with Rall in Satya magazine from 2003
• Interview with Rall on bdtheque.com - 2008