Ted Rall

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. The cartoons used to appear 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 tech and politics news site founded by journalist Gina Smith, aNewDomain, and is the editor-in-chief of the satirical news website skewednews.net.

Rall also writes and draws cartoons for Sputnik International, a news website platform established by the Russian government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya (Россия Сегодня — Russia Today).

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 and unembedded throughout the country, filing daily "cartoon blogs" by satellite.

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.

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 from the early to mid 1960s to the mid 1980s. 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.

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 (for which he also wrote) and were for several years the most reproduced cartoons in ''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:".

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).

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.

Other media

Rall was a regular guest on ''Hannity & Colmes'', as well as NPR. He contributes a cartoon called "Left Coast" to the ''Pasadena Weekly.'' In February 2005, BBC television broadcast a 30-minute profile of Rall as part of their series ''Cartoonists on the Front Line.''

Rall maintains a blogKashmir