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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Laughing at the Left: the rise of conservative cartoons |
| 2005-07-28 |
| by Harry Stein, City Journal. EFL; RTWT. Bruce Tinsley, creator of the conservative comic strip Mallard Fillmore, remembers feeling stunned when the fan letter showed up in February 1998. After all, his stripâ featuring a right-leaning TV newsman or, more accurately, newsduckâwas still in its relative infancy. Yet here was George Herbert Walker Bush declaring that he and Barbara turned to Mallard, âsage duck that he is,â first thing every morning. Even more gratifying, the former president thanked Tinsley for taking on âthat horrible Doonesburyâ and its creator, liberal icon Garry Trudeau, âa guy that tore me up in a vicious, personal way strip after strip.â . . . The Mallard strips that prompted Bushâs letter had been a response to a series of Doonesbury strips that disdainfully characterized conservative talk radio as âhate radio.â âMallard Presents: Learning the Liberal Lexicon!â reads the opening panel of one of the strips. â âHate Radio,â a common liberal word made from 2 ordinary words.â In the second panel, a bespectacled professor type explains: â âRadioââthe thing we use to listen to N.P.R. in our Volvos.â â âHate,â â adds a dowdy aging hippie in panel threeââthe word we use to describe any opinion that DISAGREES with OURS!â âThat was really terrific,â says Tinsley today of the ex-presidentâs appreciative letter, noting that from the start he intended Mallard to be, among other things, an antidote to Doonesbury. . . . . . . Tinsley created the Mallard character while working for a Charlottesville, Virginia, paper in the early nineties. In the strip, the duck landed his job in a fictional Washington newsroom only because he was âAmphibious-American.â But when a new management team took over Tinsleyâs real-life newsroom, he soon found himself out of work. The last straw for the new bosses was a strip that had Mallard musing about what might have happened if Michelangelo had applied for a National Endowment for the Arts grant. While the NEA would surely like all the naked people, the duck concluded, theyâd also object to the depiction of God as male, worrying about its disheartening influence over little girls. The new publisher, it turned out, was on NEAâs board. Happily for Tinsley, the Washington Times swiftly picked up Mallard Fillmore, followed by King Features, which recognized that the strip could fill a gaping hole in the funnies version of the political marketplace. . . . . . . Though Prickly Cityâs main characters are cuddlier than the Mallard crewâcreator Scott Stantis claims Charles Schulzâs Peanuts as a key inspirationâthereâs nothing soft about the stripâs politics or in the obvious delight it takes in thumbing its nose at politically correct norms. In fact, having replaced Mallard as the resident conservative strip at the Chicago Tribune, Stantis soon watched the paper kill one of his entries, which derided Senator Ted Kennedyâs moral high-handedness at Condoleezza Riceâs confirmation hearings by making a none-too-subtle Chappaquiddick reference. Not long after, the Seattle Times refused to run a hard-hitting Prickly City series inspired by the Terri Schiavo saga. In it, the stripâs conservative protagonist, a spunky little girl named Carmen, announces that sheâs depressed because her favorite team has lost in the NCAA Basketball Tournament; her best pal, a talking coyote named Winslow, decides that heâll relieve her of her agony by starving her to death. . . . Even as Mallard Fillmore and Prickly City alter the balance of power on the comics page, at least one right-of-center cartoonist is starting to make an impact on the web. Without the benefit of syndication or any other traditional form of promotion, Day by Day, by Chris Muir, has become a daily stop for many bloggersâ a sign of how the Right remains ahead of the curve in the blogosphere. Knowing how few newspaper editors share his conservative politics, Muir flatly declares dailies are âthe antithesis of what I want to get involved with.â Heading Muirâs cast of youngish hipsters is Damon, a young, self-made black software entrepreneur, with zero patience for the standard liberal truisms about race, economics, foreign policy, or much anything else (the strip reflects Muirâs real-world experience as a Florida-based industrial designer). âFunny,â as one of Damonâs white pals remarks to him in one recent strip, âDean says you white Christian Republican boys all look the same.â Sardonic as ever, Damon replies: âHeâs just worried Roveâll take the medical stash heâs been smokinâ.â . . . Harry Stein is the author of the delightful book How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace). |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #18 The breadth of experience and knowledge here is breath-taking and, often, quite frightening. It makes it worth every minute. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-07-28 21:42 |
| #17 I agree wholeheartedly w/ Mike on this one. I've said it before and I'll say it again...(like the old Marines commercial)....I learn more at RB before 10 am than I could even hope to learn from MSM (and even Fox News) in an entire week! Plus, you get the great commentary to boot (I personally am in awe of .com and Fred). |
| Posted by: BA 2005-07-28 21:41 |
| #16 The reality is the Right is much funnier than the Left. RB is a good example, but there are many others, PJ O'Rourke comes to mind. I think there is a simple reason behind it. In order to see the funny side of something you have to be able view it from different perspectives, whereas the Left peddles this uniform 2 dimentional view of the world, which precludes seeing it in different ways necessary to see the funny side. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-07-28 21:39 |
| #15 there's money? Frankly |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-07-28 21:06 |
| #14 Frankily, I come here for the money. |
| Posted by: Jack Rubenstein 2005-07-28 20:05 |
| #13 "I am what could easily be called poor,under-educated white trash." So what? What matters here are not your credentials, but whether you make sense. And IIRC, you usually do. Keep commenting. |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2005-07-28 16:51 |
| #12 Hey, what about me? |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2005-07-28 16:49 |
| #11 It is amazing how many sharp minds there are here in the 'Burg: Fred, the AoS, raptor, Zhang Fei, JFM, TGA, .com, Alaska Paul, badanov, Old Spook, trailing wife, Sgt. Mom, Jarhead, 11A5S, Chuck Simmins, Frank G, Ptah, Howard UK, Bulldog, Shipman, mojo, Pappy, tu3031, the inimitable muck4doo . . . I'm leaving people out, I know it! |
| Posted by: Mike 2005-07-28 16:45 |
| #10 Raptor - Kerry's educated, but dumb - voted for the war before I voted against it, and opening himself up to the Swift Boat guys.... Teddy has economic status, and a 'liberal' education, I believe, but is relatively useless, except to show the dark side. Here, one is valued for their thoughts, not their accomplishments, or their birth status. So keep posting good thoughts, and I'll keep reading them! |
| Posted by: Bobby 2005-07-28 16:34 |
| #9 Raptor, I, too, always read your comments and enjoy your thoughts. Thanks for being here. (There are some folks I do just skip over) |
| Posted by: Sherry 2005-07-28 16:11 |
| #8 I come to rantburg primarily because the posters seem far better informed than nearly any other board I've ever seen, and a large number are pretty damn funny to boot. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2005-07-28 13:09 |
| #7 Please elaborate for me,Bobby? (I think I might be feeling a little sorry for myself this morn,if so please ignore) |
| Posted by: raptor 2005-07-28 12:46 |
| #6 Education and economic status have nothing to do with intellect, Raptor. I've enjoyed your posts. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2005-07-28 12:24 |
| #5 Cox and Forkum... COX and FORKUM!!! |
| Posted by: Hyper 2005-07-28 11:51 |
| #4 One of the primary reasons Ilove RB,Bobby,is this respect that you speak of.I am what could easily be called poor,under-educated white trash.But,while sometimes my opinons,comments and thoughts are often rediculed as assinine(something I have no problem addmitting to when my stupidity is pointed out,and valid reasons are given)over-all I am given a great deal of respect here at RB that is not given to me at Liberial sites. Thank you RB'ers one and all. |
| Posted by: raptor 2005-07-28 09:59 |
| #3 day by day is an daily stop for me. |
| Posted by: raptor 2005-07-28 09:38 |
| #2 As it happens, the same holds true for Mallard creator Tinsley, whose wife is a civil rights lawyer. Thereâs perhaps a lesson here. âItâs a funny thing,â Tinsley says. âAll her liberal friends are incredulous that our marriage works, but none of my conservative friends have any trouble with it at all. They understand you can think differently about things and still be civil to one another.â Almost immediately, this observation leads Tinsley to reflect on something else. âYou ever notice how often liberals seem to think that, because they hold these lofty social views, it excuses them from having to be civil to bellboys and cabdrivers? I really think that by and large conservatives are just much nicer.â That's why RB - for civil, well-reasoned discourse - has more conservative folks who visit here. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2005-07-28 08:23 |
| #1 How observant - "I mean, the crudity and intolerance of the Left these days is unbelievable; I canât tell you how many times Iâve been called a Nazi. But thatâs what happens when you donât have any ideas and the only thing left is anger.â |
| Posted by: Bobby 2005-07-28 08:17 |