Ted Rall
Setting himself apart from the herd with a unique drawing style and hard-hitting approach, Ted Rall launched his editorial cartooning career in 1987 with a handful of small alternative weekly newspapers whose editors saw his photocopied work hanging from lampposts in New York City. In 1991 San Francisco Chronicle Features launched Rall's three-times-a-week editorial cartoon syndication with a dozen clients, including the Los Angeles Times and Philadelphia Daily News. Now with Universal Press Syndicate, Rall, called "the most controversial cartoonist in America" by the editorial cartooning site Cartoon.com, appears in more than 140 newspapers throughout the United States, ranging from the mainstream New York Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer to such alternative weeklies as the Village Voice and Los Angeles CityBeat. Because he has continued to criticize Bush's policies in the post-9/11 era via his trademark "Generalissimo El Busho" caricature of the President, Rall has become a lightening rod of criticism from the right, being smeared as "treasonous" by The Weekly Standard and "anti-American" by the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The Right Wing News website named him 2003's "Most Annoying Liberal." He has received death threats in reaction to his cartoons opposing the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Rall has won numerous awards, including the 1995 and 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for Outstanding Coverage of the Problems of the Disadvantaged. In 1996 he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. "I'm a traditionalist," Rall told an interviewer. "While some of my colleagues are happy to draw lame jokes about the news of the day, I'm trying to live up to the standard established by Thomas Nast by making people think about issues that affect their lives in new ways." There are three collections of Rall's cartoons: Waking Up In America, All The Rules Have Changed and Search and Destroy, as well as three award-winning graphic novels, My War With Brian, Real Americans Admit: The Worst Thing I've Ever Done! and 2024, a parody of Orwell's 1984. He edited the two-volume Attitude anthology of cartoons by edgy alternative weekly political cartoonists. He also wrote the influential 1998 "generational manifesto" Revenge of the Latchkey Kids, a work that reviewers said made him a de facto spokesperson for Generation X. Rall is also an expert on Central Asia who covered the war in Afghanistan, where his harrowing experience--3 of the 44 journalists with whom he traveled were killed--led to the critically acclaimed book To Afghanistan and Back. He released two books of prose during 2004, Wake Up, You're Liberal!: How We Can Take America Back From the Right and Generalissimo El Busho. Rall also writes a weekly op-ed column for Universal Press Syndicate.
|
