Ted Rall

The ‘Nuff Said! Interview; Ted Rall

Ted Rall at Stumptown Comics Festival 2007 (photo by Joshin Yamada)

Welcome back to our regular “print radio” feature, the ‘Nuff Said! interview.

For nine years Ken Gale, in conjunction with Ed Menje and Mercy Van Vlack, hosted and produced about 400 episodes of this comic-book themed series for New York’s WBAI radio station, live-streamed over the Internet for the past several years of its run.  Ken’s show covered all styles and all eras of comics, pointing out the diversity and richness of the art form to an audience who were often unaware of the versatility of sequential art. 

‘Nuff Said! ended as a regular show in 2002, but Ken has done a number of specials and guest spots on other WBAI broadcasts, continuing to show how well our art form fits in with many different, seemingly disparate topics.

The ‘Nuff Said! archive, used with Ken’s full permission and cooperation, is a ‘snapshot album’ of the careers, influences, and often surprising opinions  of  a wide range of comics creators, several of whom, sadly, are no longer with us, and many of whom are seldom if ever interviewed by comics journalists.

This interview, from 27^th January 1997, is the first of two with Ted Rall, political and editorial cartoonist, journalist and broadcaster, whose work had been collected in eight books to that date.  He talked with Ken Gale about his early career and influences, the pessimistic future of political cartooning in the USA, and the collective underside of the American psyche, gleefully explored in his book, Real Americans Admit: The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done!

Ken Gale: My guest today is Ted Rall, an editorial and political cartoonist whose work appears in… How many papers is it these days?

Ted Rall: Around a hundred, just over. It depends. It may have been cancelled last week!

Ken: When did you decide that what you wanted to do was comic strips?

Ted: All my life; I guess I had an early break. In high school, I got published in the local paper a lot, and by the time I left to go to college in New York, I already had eight local papers. So I was pretty successful in high school, then I went through a bleak period in the  mid-80’s, when I just couldn’t find anyone to run my work, and I had to start again from scratch. But I’ve always known I wanted to do this, I just wasn’t sure I could make a living at it.

Ken: What does “start from scratch” mean?

Ted: I had no clients! (laughs) At the time, I had a job working at an investment bank, and I was seriously depressed. I’d get up and just hate my job, and finally my girlfriend – who is now my wife – said; “Have you ever done anything that you liked doing?” I’d had around twenty jobs by then, because I always got fired! So, I said, “Yeah, I enjoyed drawing comics.” And she said, “Then that’s what you should do.” So I got this idea after meeting Keith Haring, who used to put chalk cartoons on the subway walls, on the blank spaces where the authority couldn’t sell ads! I started Xeroxing off my cartoons at work, and every week, on Monday, my girlfriend and I would walk down Broadway from 116^th down to 42^nd, and we’d paste them on lampposts, bus stops, the side of buildings, cars, if people seemed to have expensive cars – ! (laughs)

Ken: What sort of cartoons were they?

Ted: Basically the same sort of stuff I’m doing now – social and political commentary. I always viewed myself as a straight political cartoonist, but I don’t really do that, I finally figured that out a few years ago. What I’m really doing is… some of it’s just quirky; you get an idea, it doesn’t really fit in to anything, so I get a good idea and I use it, it doesn’t matter if it’s political or not –

Rall's take on downsizing, from Revenge of the Latchkey Kids

Ken: Don’t your editors complain about that?

Ted: No, they like it, actually, and I was concerned about that when I started, because most of my clients are editorial pages in daily papers, then, in some alternative weeklies, they put you in the back by the porno ads, so I tried to do more straight-ahead political stuff, and I started getting complaints from editors saying; “Hey, what happened to the really weird things, like washing your dishes in the toilet and stuff?” So I was; “You like that? Okay, I’ll write it…” Part of the problem was when you’re syndicated, you don’t get to see which of your cartoons are run, say, in the Anchorage Press, so I’ve no idea what they like up there! When you have so many papers running your strip –

Ken: Why not just call them? One paper a week, say “Hi, this is your Ted Rall call! What do you like up there?”

Ted: “Nothing, man, we’re going to cancel you!” (laughs)

Ken: That response from the editors. Is that the most that you’ve been edited?

Ted: I do get edited, in a way, by the syndicate. I send three cartoons a week to Universal Press, and they’ll look at them, make sure everything’s okay – I have a problem, I can’t hyphenate properly, I break the word in the wrong place; I’ve never been able to figure that out, so that kind of stupid stuff they catch a lot. It’s only once or twice a year I do a cartoon – and I usually know it’s coming – that’s such complete libel-bait that they call and say, “Listen, Ted; we gotta talk”. But that doesn’t happen as often as you’d think.

Ken: how did you choose the syndicate that you’re with?

Ted: I started out with Chronicle Features, which is owned by the San Francisco Chronicle, in 1991, and I chose them because they were the only syndicate that would have me!

Ken: They were the people who had The Far Side, right?

Ted: That’s right. They were very cool people to start out with, they have good taste there. But they’re also a very good syndicate, they treat artists well, I loved working with them.

Ken: Gary Larson says good things about them, too.

Ted: That doesn’t surprise me. They don’t screw anyone, they’re great. Their standard contract gives you copyright, they don’t nickel & dime you on a lot of deductions… there’s a lot of syndicates that take your originals – I’m not going to say which ones! – and it’s outrageous to ask for original art from a political cartoonist or a strip artist. My contract came up for renewal in the summer of ’96, and I had a very difficult decision; I was lucky to have a choice between several syndicates, and I went with the biggest one, because I just felt I’d grown as much as I could with Chronicle’s sales capacity, they don’t have a lot of salespeople. Universal has people out on the road all the time…

Ken: Did it help?

Ted: Oh yeah, I picked up a bunch of new papers.

Ken: What areas are you in, mostly? From earlier conversations, you seem to know most of the newspapers you’re in…

Ted: Oh, I’ve gotta know that stuff. The Deep South and California is the centre of interest – I’ve got LA, San Jose, San Francisco… I’ve just got California blanketed. And for some reason, they love me in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, it’s just insane. I think people are desperate for left-wing commentary in places like that, or maybe they just say, “Let’s put this guy in here to mess with the readers and get some letters.”

Ken: It’s very bizarre that your stuff is so popular there; I mean, you make fun of religion; you’re doing anti-smoking stuff…

Ted: I tell you, they love me down there. The toughest market for me has been New England, I really thought; “Oh, I’ll get the Boston Globe, I’ll get the New England Register..” No way! There are whole states in the North-East where I don’t have a single paper, even a coupon shopper won’t have me!

Ken: I’m puzzled why you’re not in the New York Press, or the Village Voice, at least…

Ted: Well, the Voice’s aesthetic is more of the ‘Baby Boomer’, and I don’t think they’re that interested in the ‘Generation X’ type of stuff, which I’m more perceived as being. Although I’ve talked to the Art Director, and it’s “Ehh, I like your stuff…” but I don’t hear back from him. And with the Press, well, I’ve been working on those guys for a year, they like my writing, they’ll publish that, but –

A turning point in Rall's My War With Brian, subsequently collected as a Graphic Novel by NBM

Ken: Yeah, I read that one about your “War With Brian” –

Ted: NBM might be doing a graphic novel of that.

Ken: I thought when I was reading it that it would be a great Graphic Novel.

Ted: I seriously am going to start working on the storyboards for that soon, because, girl cartoonists get to do a lot of self-referential “My First Period” kind of stuff, and I wanted to do one of those! (laughs) “My First Period – In High School!”

Ken: I can understand the Press’ thoughts, because when I first saw your stuff in Comic Relief, to be honest, the artwork kind of turned me off, and I skipped it, and somewhere along the line, it caught my eye and I started reading it, and now I look forward to it every month.

Ted: Why thank you, Ken…

Ken: You’ve been in Comic Relief for years now, and it’s great stuff, but your artwork does take some getting used to.

Ted: In syndication, we got a lot of feedback from editors about that, and any time you break in with a new artistic style – I used to draw like Jeff MacNelly or Mike Peters, I did the cross-hatched, generic political cartoon with donkeys and elephants and stuff –

Ken: Occasionally, you still do. I saw one where you were drawing Clinton and Dole in that manner, and at the time I thought you were making fun of that style.

Ted: I started out working that way, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. I got a letter from the editor of the Des Moines Register. He wrote; “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever run a lame Mike Peters wannabe.”, and I thought, “God, he’s so mean, and he’s so right!” (laughs) I sat down and I spent three or four years developing a unique graphic look that I thought, not only was it something that I’d enjoy doing, and it has a message, but it looks different! When you look at my cartoons, you know what you’re looking at in advance before you even start reading. I think it’s really important to have that kind of recognizable style, in the long term, but people have to get used to it, and – it’s like the Ramones; people like them because all the songs start the same! People like reliability.

So, it took me years to get people past the new style, and there are still editors who can’t stand it, but with the Press, I don’t think that’s it so much as the political content, they shy away from very strident political commentary when it comes to cartoons.

Ken: Their editorial can cover it, but once it gets to the cartoons… Carol Lay does a lot of political stuff, though.

Ted: Carol Lay is one of my favourite cartoonists, and a personal friend. She does do political stuff, but it’s not as straightforward as my “all CEOs are scum and should be hung from lampposts.” her Story Minutes are post-modern fairytales, and if you get to do a little political commentary on the side, that’s great, but it’s not the main purpose; she’ll tell you that herself, she’s not real political.

Ken: I notice one theme that pops up often in your work, it’s talking about Wage Slaves, and Unemployment, and how people don’t get paid what they’re worth, and CEOs don’t get paid what they’re worth, either (both laugh) and things like that. Is that what drives you the most? Or is it just something that you get the most ideas about?

Ted: I used to work on Wall Street and in banking. Throughout the 1980’s, I used to work for a Japanese bank and before that for Bear Sterns, the investment firm, and I spent ten years in the Belly of the Beast, basically, and I didn’t go into it as a Republican, by any means, but I always had the view that Capitalism and the Free Markets were maybe not socially just or fair, but I viewed them as very efficient, kind of the Darwinistic approach – Capitalism is what people Really Are, and if they don’t strive for more, this is what animals are like. I saw what was going on, I was surrounded by all sorts of ego-driven madness, millions, hundreds of millions of dollars are literally squandered on nothing, and I realised, “This shit isn’t even efficient. It doesn’t even work!” They talk about the failure of Communism, and yes, it failed, but Capitalism failed too! It’s like, “You guys are zero for two; give me something else!” And I feel that, in the mainstream media, I’m pretty much a cry in the wilderness, there aren’t too many other cartoonists or writers out there hitting the system as hard as I am. There are people saying “Newt Gingrich is scum”, or “Bob Dole is scum”, and Bob Dole was scum, but the more important fact is that the democrats and the republicans are the same thing, the whole electoral system is corrupt and I’m much more interested in systematic problems, rather than individuals, because people tend to act in predictable ways when you run them through a maze that you set up in a certain way. With the cult of the individual, Americans tend to think, “Well, it’s pretty much up to you. If we were overrun by Nazis, then if you’re a good person, then you’re a good Nazi!” and I’m, “No, you’re a Nazi, and being in a Nazi state will make you act in a Nazi way.” Or substitute Nazi with any other ideology –

Ken: I remember one of your one-panel cartoons with a whole bunch of little cities saying, “We’ll fire everybody and somebody else will buy our stuff…”

Ted: … And they were all saying that, that’s the idea of downsizing, it’s very small-minded, it’s very short-term, and everybody’s going to turn around in five years and it’ll be, “Honey, I Crashed The Economy!” What do you expect? You fire all the employees, who are the customers! You can’t sell everything to the Japanese – they’re broke now too! Yes, I get a lot of those ideas because it’s the stuff that makes me angry, and it’s also my employment experience, but I do try to go after other issues, I’m really interested in race relations, the death penalty, and also the oppression, which we don’t think about in a day-to-day way as being oppression, that parents oppress their kids by force of being parents – they have to, otherwise they’re not doing their job, but it’s still kind of a strange relationship. When I get points across on those kinds of issues, I feel I’ve really succeeded, because the corporate stuff is easy.

Ken: Where do you think the future of political cartooning lies?

Ted: I don’t think there is a future for political cartooning in America, and you could probably do a four-hour show just on that topic. In 1980, there were over 280 working political cartoonists – working on staff at papers. Now, there are fewer than eighty, but nobody’s noticed. Nobody cares. And part of the problem is that most of the job loss has been the loss of newspapers overall – the Phoenix Gazette just closed after 160 years; we’re just bleeding dailies. We haven’t gone a year without losing a couple of big ones, and when those go, the jobs go. And what people don’t realise is that all those former staffers don’t easily get rehired. Writers get placed elsewhere, if they’re good, but cartoonists – there’s even an idea in the remaining dailies that when people retire, they’re not to be replaced. At the San Francisco Examiner, the staff cartoonist quit to do a comic strip, and he was never replaced. The Examiner has had its financial problems, but they’re owned by the Hearst Corporation, they have deep pockets, they could afford a new cartoonist, but they decided to run only syndicated material instead, because you can buy syndicated comics for $15 a week for three, and you can get twenty of those, and have an amazing variety of political cartoons by Pulitzer winners, people like Oliphant, MacNelly, all the stars, while you’d have to pay a cartoonist at least $50,000 plus benefits, because of the union rules.

Ken:: If they had a staff cartoonist, doesn’t that mean they could be the one who does the syndicating?

Ted: Not really; normally, syndicate contracts are a separate matter. If I was the staff cartoonist at a daily paper – and I’d love to be, but I can’t find a job! – then I would retain my contract with Universal Press, and I’d still owe three cartoons a week to them, and the newspaper would use those in addition to the ones I drew for them. The typical thing is to do two or three cartoons for the local paper in addition to your syndicate contract. So what the local papers and their readers are losing is commentary about local issues; no more Guiliani cartoons, no more Pataki cartoons, and it’s a shame…

Ken: Tammany Hall would never be brought down again! A cartoonist brought down the most corrupt city government ever, probably…

Ted: And today Boss Tweed would be safe. It’s an amazing thing. There’s also a problem with reader loyalty. Editors have found that when they eliminate political cartoons, they don’t hear from the readers. It’s not like cancelling Blondie – cancel that, and God help you, people will throw stuff at your kids on their way home from school! But you cancel MacNelly, and (whistling tumbleweed noise) nobody hears anything! It’s just like it never happened. Political cartoons are dying. We’ve already lost an entire generation of cartoonists who would have started in their twenties, and who have not found work. There’s no hope. There’s no reason for hope. There’s no cause for hope. Even well-established cartoonists, people who have Pulitzers, are looking for other work; they’re going into writing, graphic illustration, painting even, just to get out… I started writing in order to supplement my income as a cartoonist, and you know it’s a sad day when members of a profession look at freelance writing as a cash cow! (laughs)

Ken: But you’re saying there aren’t going to be any new jobs? None of the people doing editorial cartoons now are going to last forever…

Ted: But they will never be replaced.

Ken: So eventually there will be no political cartoons appearing anywhere in the world?

Ted: And the reason for that is – I left out one part of the equation – is that the political cartoonists who have retired, at the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Examiner – we’re not talking small papers here – have not  been replaced, nor are there any plans to replace them. Those papers are relying on syndicated stuff, but – and this is another example of that short-term, downsizing, corporate mentality – the only reason that syndicated stuff has been so cheap is that it was based on the assumption that syndication was supplemental to the income of a staff cartoonist! That guy would be making between $50,000 to $200,000 a year working for the Podunk XYZ News, and then if he got a couple hundred bucks coming in a month from syndication, that’s beer money! But it’s not like that any more; there are fewer and fewer jobs, so syndicate rates would have to skyrocket in order to provide a living wage to a political cartoonist; they would have to go up by a tenfold factor, and papers aren’t going to pay that. So one of two things is going to have to happen. Either no-one will be able to afford to be a syndicated cartoonist, or they’ll jack up the rates so high that newspapers will only subscribe to two or three cartoons instead of twenty or thirty, in which case the field of people supplying syndicated cartoons will shrink by a factor of ten. There’s literally nothing that can save American political cartoons at this point. The decision needed to be made back in the Seventies, and it wasn’t.

Even if they started hiring political cartoonists today, we’ve already lost a generation, and there’s no reason to believe those editors are going to change their point of view. They don’t think cartoons are valuable. They see them as a nuisance, and most of the editors are graduates of journalism school, where you don’t have to take a single class about cartoons, they don’t know anything about cartoons, and they don’t want to know! That’s another reason why papers are going down the drain, because the editors only know about text, and the young people like graphics.

Ken: Well, people in general like graphics. The mass-market magazines, there’s nothing but graphics. Often, there’s no substance, because of that, and then newspapers are going the other way. But you’re saying that if I was to talk about Tammany Hall, that he might not know that a cartoonist brought down Tammany Hall?

Ted: He might know that, but if you asked him “What value does having a political cartoonist at your paper serve, or would it serve?” you’d just get a long pause. I think we’re moving to the next question, which is, “Would newspapers be interested in bringing down Tammany Hall any more?” These days, newspaper are mainly owned by multi-media conglomerates, and they don’t have as much interest in bringing down the power elite as they did 100, 150 years ago, when getting readership was the important thing. Now, they don’t think they can get more readership; they think they’ve peaked out, they’re now seeing a decline in readership.

Ken: The population goes up, their readership goes down, but they don’t see any potential…

Ted: Except the alternative weeklies are booming.

Ken: The New York Press, an alternative weekly, became so successful that it forced the Village Voice to become a free paper, and I think a lot of that’s because of the comics!

Ted: Oh, the comics are a cornerstone of the New York Press, but even in that, which is probably one of the most supportive papers for comics in the country, they’ve been dropping them. You’ll find some of them there one week and not others, they’re pushing them back further into the middle of the porno ads – they’re inconsistent. You have to educate the editors; the editor at the New York Press is a smart guy, maybe he won’t listen to what I suggest, but at least he will listen. That’s more than you can say for most editors, who really don’t care about cartoons, and view them as potentially troublesome, especially if they’re political. Let me tell you a story – I was up for a job at the Asbury Park Press, a few years ago. The editor called me into his corner office, he pointed down to the parking lot and said, “How can you guarantee that if I hire you, I won’t have a police barricade out there with a crowd of picketers?” And I was just astonished, I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t until I was halfway home that it occurred to me, I should have said, “You know what? You should be happy if that happens; it means I’m doing my job!” One of the very first papers I worked on in Ohio, I did a cartoon of the School Superintendent, the guy sued for libel, and my editor called me up – I was sixteen – and he says “You’re going to be subpoenaed tomorrow”, and I was, “Oh, I’m really sorry, and thanks for running my cartoons”. And he goes, “What do you mean?” “Well, I’m fired, aren’t I?” and he said, “Not at all; I’m doubling your salary.”

A tawdry tale from Real Americans Admit: "The Worst Thing I've Ever Done!".

Ken: In 1997, you had a Graphic Novel out from NBM, entitled The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done…

Ted: And in fact it’s the most successful thing I’ve ever done! Basically, it’s a 64-page collection of people’s answers to the question; “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” and I got 630 answers, off the Internet, people I met on planes, at parties, friends, relatives, anyone – for a year of my life, I just asked people this question, and tried to round it out by getting as wide a socioeconomic range as possible, and I chose the 23 stories that I thought were the most interesting, the most representative, and what I was seeking to find out was, “What are people capable of at their absolute worst?” It tells you a lot about the American psyche. I used their words as captions and I drew out the rest of it. I made up the way they looked and stuff, and a few of the comments they may not have told me, but I stuck to their stories, it’s sort of a Stan Mack real-life funnies thing…

Ken: How do you know if they’re true or not?

Ted: A lot of people called in and gave me stories that I thought weren’t true, so I’d call them and be like; “Does this sort of make sense? Do I believe them?” So, I can’t say they’re all true, but they felt true, and I rejected a number of stories that didn’t feel true. I just trusted my instincts.

Ken: They kind of rang true – even the most demented ones! I thought, “Yeah, I can see someone going nuts over their neighbour’s cat, and trying to kill their pet rabbit by putting it in the freezer and the rabbit eats their frozen vegetables” – granted, the guy’s a moron, but that’s all the more reason that it could be true! (laughs) It’s very bizarre stuff, and I notice that you didn’t make the stories a uniform length…

Ted: No, and it’s not based on the ‘crime’; it’s just that some stories take longer to tell, “I went outside, I saw him, I shot him, he’s dead.” – it doesn’t take long to tell! And then stealing someone’s lottery ticket, that can be a more involved topic…

Ken: Some of these ‘Worst Things’ though, I found pretty lame. I mean, someone picks up somebody in a bar, it’s like, “Oh big deal, it’s not like that never happens!”

Ted: Well, I addressed that in the introduction. I didn’t want to run any of these, like, Guilty Women stories, “I met this guy and we had a one-night stand and I felt terrible the next day”, because, personally, my response was, “No, you didn’t understand the question; what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”, (laughs) and I got so many of those stories that my wife said, “You’ve got to run it; you’re like a scientist here, you have to report.”

I did want to take my, my self out of it – I’ve gotten letters from people saying that I’m endorsing cat murder and rabbit murder, and nothing could be further from the truth! It’s not entitled Gee, Aren’t These Cool Things People Have Done?, I’m not making any judgements here…

Ken: You have a few things to say about the Pulitzer system, don’t you?

Ted: Yes – I really want to win it this year! But having said that, the Pulitzer system is strange; the way things played out in 1996; I was one of three finalists, which I did not have any reason to expect, and I’m really happy about that. But the person who won it, and who absolutely deserved it, was not one of the finalists. The other two finalists were Tom Toles and Jim Borgman, so, nice company, and I certainly would not have been insulted to lose to either one. But the Committee can sort of decide, “Well, we don’t like any of the finalists, so what else you got?” They decided neither of the other guys were good enough to get it either! Jim Warren’s a great cartoonist, he was going to get it one year or another, and he got it that year, but hopefully my ship’ll come in at some point…

Following this interview, My War With Brian was released by NBM in graphic novel form, and, after  the events of September 11th, 2001, Rall visited Afghanistan, later discussing his experiences with Ken Gale and Mercy Van Vlack in a second ‘Nuff Said! interview on 5th July 2002, which will be running on the FA website soon.

Transcription and framing text by Will Morgan.