Frederick Theodore Rall III (born August 26, 1963) is an American columnist, syndicated editorial cartoonist, and author. His political cartoons often appear in a multi-panel comic-strip format and frequently blend comic-strip and editorial-cartoon conventions. At their peak, Rall's cartoons appeared in approximately 100 newspapers around the United States. He was president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists from 2008 to 2009.
Rall draws three editorial cartoons a week for syndication, draws illustrations on a freelance basis, writes a weekly syndicated column, and edits the Attitude series of alternative cartooning anthologies and spin-off collections by up-and-coming cartoonists. He writes and draws cartoons for the news and politics news site founded by journalist Russ Baker, WhoWhatWhy.org,.
He is a graphic novelist and the author of non-fiction books about domestic and international current affairs. He also travels to and writes about Central Asia, a region he believes to be pivotal to U.S. foreign policy concerns. In November 2001 he went to Afghanistan as a war correspondent for The Village Voice and KFI Radio in Los Angeles. He returned to Afghanistan in August 2010, traveling independently, filing daily "cartoon blogs" by satellite.
Rall is the co-host of three news-focused podcasts on YouTube and Rumble: "DeProgram" with Jamarl Thomas, "DMZ America" with Chicago Tribune editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis, and "The TMI Show" with Manila Chan.
Early life and education
Frederick Theodore Rall III 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.
Career
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.
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.
Rebuking of Spiegelman and lawsuit In 1999, Rall wrote an article in The Village VoiceRall, Ted. "The King of Comix: With Raw, a Pulitzer Prize For Maus, and a Strategic Job at The New Yorker, Art Spiegelman Has Become Lord of All New York Cartoonists. But His Power Is No Laughing Matter,", The Village Voice, July 27, 1999. 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.Dean, Michael. Danse Macabre: Another Date for Ted Rall and Danny Hellman, The Comics Journal. The lawsuit remains unresolved.
Rall's cartoons have been handled by San Francisco Chronicle Features, no longer in business, and—since 1996—by Universal Press Syndicate.
Rall's cartoons have appeared regularly in Rolling Stone, Time, Fortune and Men's Health magazines, as well as Mad magazine and 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:".
In 2005, Rall was 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."
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.MacDonald, Heidi. "Universal Uclick to syndicate United's comic strips," The Beat (February 24, 2011).
Pat Tillman's death cartoon Rall released a cartoon on May 3, 2004, following the death of 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), depicting him 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".
This strip sparked massive public outrage for portraying Tillman, and other veterans, as idiotic and enlisting to kill people. In the aftermath of the publication he was sent multiple death threats and was laid off from MSNBC. Rall defended his style, arguing that political cartoonists are meant to challenge widely accepted heroic narratives and provoke uncomfortable national discussions rather than conform to mainstream sentiment.
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".
2004 election disability analogy A November 8, 2004, cartoon 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 disability rights advocates and led to his cartoons being dropped from The Washington Posts 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." Anti-veteran sentiments 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.
Coulter Lawsuit 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. 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".
Rall's work includes the book The Anti-American Manifesto (Seven Stories Press), published in September 2010. His book, The Book of Obama: From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt (Seven Stories Press) was released in July 2012.
Dismissal from the Los Angeles Times In July 2015, the Los Angeles Times released a "note to readers" stating that Rall had been dropped from the paper because of allegations that he had recently lied about a 2001 encounter with the police."Editor's Note: a note to readers", Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2015. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) claimed that Rall misrepresented the encounter in a May 2015 opinion blog post he wrote about enforcement of jaywalking laws in Los Angeles.Ted Rall, "LAPD's crosswalk crackdown: Don't police have something better to do?" Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2015.