Ted Rall - Career

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 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 in the 1960s. 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 the Democrats or 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.

Rall's cartoons have appeared regularly in Rolling Stone, Time, Fortune and Men's Health magazines, and were for several years the most reproduced cartoons in the New York Times.

He has also written and drawn for Mad magazine.

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 P.O.V. 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 webcartoonists.

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

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