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Laughing at the Left: the rise of conservative cartoons
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 strip— featuring a right-leaning TV newsman or, more accurately, newsduck—was still in its relative infancy. Yet here was George Herbert Walker Bush declaring that he and Barbara turned to Mallard, “sage duck that he is,” first thing every morning. Even more gratifying, the former president thanked Tinsley for taking on “that horrible Doonesbury” and its creator, liberal icon Garry Trudeau, “a guy that tore me up in a vicious, personal way strip after strip.” . . .

The Mallard strips that prompted Bush’s letter had been a response to a series of Doonesbury strips that disdainfully characterized conservative talk radio as “hate radio.”

“Mallard Presents: Learning the Liberal Lexicon!” reads the opening panel of one of the strips. “ ‘Hate Radio,’ a common liberal word made from 2 ordinary words.” In the second panel, a bespectacled professor type explains: “ ‘Radio’—the thing we use to listen to N.P.R. in our Volvos.” “ ‘Hate,’ ” adds a dowdy aging hippie in panel three—“the word we use to describe any opinion that DISAGREES with OURS!”

“That was really terrific,” says Tinsley today of the ex-president’s 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 “Amphibious-American.” But when a new management team took over Tinsley’s 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, they’d 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 NEA’s 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 City’s main characters are cuddlier than the Mallard crew—creator Scott Stantis claims Charles Schulz’s Peanuts as a key inspiration—there’s nothing soft about the strip’s 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 Kennedy’s moral high-handedness at Condoleezza Rice’s 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 strip’s conservative protagonist, a spunky little girl named Carmen, announces that she’s depressed because her favorite team has lost in the NCAA Basketball Tournament; her best pal, a talking coyote named Winslow, decides that he’ll 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 bloggers— 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 “the antithesis of what I want to get involved with.”

Heading Muir’s 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 Muir’s real-world experience as a Florida-based industrial designer). “Funny,” as one of Damon’s white pals remarks to him in one recent strip, “Dean says you white Christian Republican boys all look the same.” Sardonic as ever, Damon replies: “He’s just worried Rove’ll take the medical stash he’s been smokin’.” . . .

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 2005-07-28
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=125239