THE MAXIMUMROCKNROLL INTERVIEW
June 1995
by Tim Yohannan
Ted Rall sent MMR his syndicated cartoons recently. I was surprised for severak reasons. For one, I was curious to know how such radical and biting commentary could get run in major newspapers around the country. I was also wondering why he chose to send them to us. So, I gave him a call and found out that Ted is a long time punk kinda guy. Ergo, this look into his
history, outlook and technique.
-TIM YO
MRR: How old are you, Ted?
T: Thirty one.
MRR: And when did you start drawing?
T: Since I was a little kid, but for publication, since I was in school.
My first published cartoon was in 1980.
MRR: What brought you to express yourself that way?
T: I just always liked cartoons. A lot of kids draw cartoons but they give up
doing it later as they find out how hard it is. I was kinda stubborn, plus I was lucky that I got
published in a local paper very, very quickly.
MRR: Where was this?
T: In Dayton, Ohio. They gave me a lot of encouragement and they paid me. The editor was really nice.
I admired Mike Peters, the editorial cartoonist at the Dayton Daily News, and he invited me to his office,
showed me how to use the tools and told me a lot about editorial cartooning. Then I went to college at
Columbia in New York, and there cartooning was basically a way to meet women. I was in the campus paper.
My cartoons started to change then, in '81. I had been doing a lot of angry anti-Reagan stuff, and some
of my work was so angry and so bitter and brutal that it turned a lot of people off. So I'd do the angry
ones and then do ones that were social commentary - people who don't get along with their parents, husbands
and wives who get divorced. It was still bitter and angry, but it wasn't political. I did both at the
same time, as well as weird, experimental stuff. Then in '84 I got expelled from school...
MRR: How?
T: I was in engineering school... I don't know what I was thinking... I had terrible
grades because I never went to class and just went to punk shows. I had an underground paper then, too,
which was really obscene and violent. They wanted to get rid of me, and finally caught me throwing stuff
off the roof of the dorm. It was a nightmare. I dropped out, got a day job, worked three jobs, stopped
cartooning, got really depressed. I sent out letters all over the country, got rejected everywhere.
Everybody sent me these nasty rejection letters telling me how bad I was, how much I sucked. So, there's
two answers to your question because I really didn't draw again till ‘87-'88. I went four years during
the bleakest Reagan era, not drawing. I was shut down. I was working on Wall St, which I hated, was
driving a cab at night, getting no sleep, totally exhausted, totally broke, just miserable. In '88 I
was thinking about the fact that I hated my life and the only thing that I had ever done that I enjoyed
doing. So I decided that no matter what, whether I was successful or not, I was going to draw. So I
came at it from a different angle and ended up being not the same kind of cartoonist that I was originally,
which was a standard editorial cartoonist. Even though I'm a member of the Editorial Cartoonists Association
and certain papers run me as such, I'm not really locked into that.
MRR: For those of us who don't necessarily know what that means, what are the distinctions?
T: Editorial cartoons seek to make a point about some current event or situation that
the artist sees as going on in society. A typical thing would be to read the paper, see that Newt Gingrich
said something outrageous, and then do something that attacks him specifically. Or go after homelessness
specifically. And I do that kind of stuff, but I am also a social commentary cartoonist, which is to do a
lot of stuff about human interaction, try to make politics personal. I do very few caricatures of Newt
Gingrich or Bill Clinton, etc. Those guys don't really interest me cuz I see them as all functioning as
part of the greater system. I have a much more evolved political viewpoint, and see them as being a tool
of the corporations. So the issues I go after are more done by trying to spin a web, draw my readers in
and show them that this is what’s going on, this little thing is just another example of this big thing.
I am into propaganda and am not just a passive observer. Most editorial cartoonists are like 55 year old
white guys in suits who work at big corporations. They don't have any sense of wanting to change the world
and are quite happy about the way it is. They get paid to draw little pictures every day, which is a
pretty damned good job.
MRR: Do you think that if you ever got to the point where you were making your entire living off syndicating your cartoons that your position would change, your mentality would change,
if you "got comfortable?"
T: It's possible. I'm afraid of that, to tell you the truth, because it's the next logical
step. I've gone through a weird, ass-backwards career path. Normally you send out samples to newspapers, one
of them hires you, then after you've been there a while you get a syndication contract, then after you've been
syndicated for a while you get books. Then you're it. I did everything ass-backwards. I got a book very early,
and to my knowledge, I'm the first editorial cartoonist ever to be syndicated without having a job at a paper.
And that probably says a lot about the state of the newspaper industry. The next step for me would be to
get a job at a paper. If that were ever to happen, then I'd be making a living from this. Or, if I'd have
to be in three times as many papers as I am now. I think if I were in three times as many papers I'd still
feel safe. Right now I'm in 76 papers. If three of them cancel me, I'm not going to die, lose my house, etc.
But if I was working at a paper and got fired, that's a different thing and I'd really be owned by them. I've
seen it with other cartoonists. It's not to say I don't want the job, but it does happen and they do get coopted.
This guy, Clay Bennett, was the staff cartoonist at the St Petersburg paper in Florida, and just got fired. I always
thought he sucked - really lame and trite. Now, he's doing good stuff. There was a really good artist hiding
under that big, fat editor who was keeping him down. Most editors really do want to tell the artist what to do.
When you see lame cartoons, you shouldn't blame the cartoonist as much as the editor. At the same time,
the cartoonists agree to do it. It's an icky system.
MRR: So you'd prefer to be syndicated on a broader level, as opposed to having all your eggs in one basket.
T: if I could spread out a little bit and get some more papers I'd be all set.
MRR: Do you think, given your political outlook, that that's likely? I'm pretty surprised
that you've been syndicated to the extent that you have. What major papers are you in?
T: The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, NY Times, Atlanta Constitution...
MRR: So are you their token whatever?
T: I'm their "generation x" wonder boy. The thing about these newspaper editors is...
the buzz is all about how to get the 16-35 year olds to read the paper, and nobody does because they're
all reading MRR. (laughter). They can't figure out what it is, and these editors are really thick. They
think that if they throw this generation of people a bone, buy one of their cartoonists, hire a couple of
young reporters, maybe have a "generation x" column, then "presto, we'll double our circulation and get
all those readers back who are reading alternative weeklies and weird "gen x" mags." It just doesn’t
work that way and they're foolish. It's the whole overall fact that newspapers aren't credible. It's
not the fact that they're slower than the Internet or slower than TV, it's that they're not credible and
that they're boring and that they're the voice of the government and everybody knows it, even if they're
conservatives they don't believe it. They've lost two generations of readers so far, and that's why
they're dying. They committed suicide. Look, there are some cool editors. Half of my editors are
just jerks and don't know why they’re running me... they think they’re cool and want to do it but don't
understand the work at all. And then there's those that really are like a secret weapon hidden in the
bowels of the corporation. making these decisions totally on their own. When their older bosses
say, "Hey, what's this cartoon with the guy killing his father?", they go "Oh, don't worry about it, the
young kids love that."
MRR: You send out three strips a week; Do you know which one they're running?
Would they run the one that talks about how brutal capitalism is?
T: It ran in a lot of papers. But it's hard to know because the papers don't send tear
sheets and I go to the out-of-town news stand to check. Now I have my e-mail address on my cartoons, so
at least I hear from the bourgeois computer owners. It's very strange though, because the most outrageous
cartoons get run by the most conservative papers. It's not to say that the most liberal papers are running
the most conservative cartoons, but the really out ones end up in the LA Times and not Des Moines or
Philadelphia. It's a mystery. I think there's only a very few that never have gotten run anywhere.
And I make sure to put those in my books!
MRR: What Distinguishes those?
T: They’re personal, cruel attacks. I did one when Polly Klaas was killed.
It attacked her father for having abandoned their family and never having taken care of her until
she croaked, and then he showed up at her funeral with Linda Ronstadt and all these politicians.
I took him to task, which was considered kicking someone when they’re down. It was called "tasteless'.
Another one was right after the Gulf War when it came out that American tanks, on the final push towards
Baghdad, used special bulldozer attachments to bury thousands of Iraqi troops alive. The story
appeared one day and just disappeared the next. Cartoonists will do this, will say "I can't let
this one go", and then really exploit it to make everybody aware. That's the best thing about
being a cartoonist, the ability to take something that people might just let slip by.... I did
one, a take-off on the Ramones "Rocket To Russia" cover with Coney Island scene with the wonder
wheel and roller coaster. It's a beach scene and all these people are being buried alive on the
beach by Marines and the caption was "How Gulf War vets spend their summer." Editors were furious!
I did another two years ago when the chairman of Time-Warner, Stephen Ross, had just died. The year
before he had just paid himself 80 million dollars and had laid off 10,000 workers. I was like "why
didn’t they just fire him and keep all those workers?" What a pig! I did a cartoon saying he deserved
to die and got what was coming to him. Again several editors called my syndicate to say that I was
just totally out of control.
MRR: Do they cancel?
T: Yeah, but not often. You have to have some cajones to buy this. I'm not the
ballsiest thing in print, but it terms of what runs in a daily, I am. If an editor has already bought
my cartoons, they probably already have the stomach to keep it. I have very few cancellations, and
generally it's a slow build, one or two at a time, and I hold on to them. The big one that I lost that
really hurt was the Chicago Tribune after a month. That really hurt because I wanted that big Midwestern paper.
I don't know why they canceled: they say it was just the money, but if you knew how little they pay,
you wouldn't believe that!
MRR: Let's talk about your connection to punk. When did you first get into it?
T: When I was a kid I picked up the first Clash album. Up til that point I hated all
rock music. There was no music scene in Dayton, and I was only into classical. But then it was like
"No, this is what I've been waiting for!" Then I started really getting into it. I'd go to the store
and buy stacks of singles, got into it really quickly and obsessively. When I moved to NY in '81, the
Lower East Side scene was ending. I saw the last Blondie concert at CBGBs. But hardcore was into full
throttle. I was into Flipper, DKs, Geza X, Avengers (who had broken up unfortunately by then), Big Boys...
I didn't like the LA bands so much except for early Black Flag, but right after "Damaged" I thought it
was over. Bad Brains, Offs, MDC, Crucifucks, early Reagan Youth before they went metal. They did an
entire set one night of just Simon & Garfunkle songs. I never knew those songs were actually good till then,
it was just that they had never been played right! It took me a while to get into the older English bands,
and ended up getting into them after the fact. By the time I got into Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex, Wire, they
were all defunct.
MRR: Do you keep up these days?
T: Yeah, though I lost touch with a lot of the hardcore scene cuz I got really
depressed in the late '80s when I'd go to shows in NY. It had gotten really violent. My girlfriend
got her ass kicked by these jocks for no reason. It was scary. Also, the metal influence was such
a turnoff. God, even now, people say Nirvana was great but I'd say "they'd be good except for that
metal riff he just played." I'm allergic to that! I guess there's nothing intrinsically wrong with
appropriating a Black Sabbath riff, the Dickies did it...
MRR: But that was satire...
T: ...and it sounds good when they do it! I still haunt record stores. I hate all
those "waif" bands. I've spent the last 8 years filling in holes in my collection, the ‘77-’86 period.
(We take a break and play a bunch of current punk bands: Rip Offs, Oblivians, Teengenerate, Diesel Queens, etc.., etc. He loves them.)
MRR: How did you end up here in S.F.?
T: My wife's a grad student at UC Berkeley, but we may move back to NY after she graduates. One of the
things I miss about NY is that I used to get a lot of freelance illustration work because all the magazines
are located there. Even though it's total artistic prostitution, it's cool to pick up that money. But the
idea of going back and paying the kind of rent I used to pay is devastating! But I like NY, the buzz and energy.
MRR: I want to ask about your childhood. Where did you get to be bitter?
T: That's an easy one. I was raised in Kettering, a lily white suburb of Dayton, Ohio.
My father divorced my mother when I was 2 and hit the road, leaving us to totally starve. I had a very
poor childhood, and even though my mom worked really hard and did her best, it was always a question as
to where my next meal was coming from up until high school. I did a lot of odd jobs. That's where I
picked up a real anger towards people who are irresponsible and just take off but then think it's OK and
want your love. It's like how I look at rich people: it's not enough that they're stealing your money
and having you live poor, but then they want you to admire and like them. Hey, I may not kill you, that's
already a favor! Then, where I grew up everybody was so right wing, racist, homophobic, stupid, ignorant.
It's the kind of place where if you read a book you'd get your ass kicked! Once I read an interview with
Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys, who was from Cleveland, and he was talking to Debbie Harry who was about
to go on tour in Ohio. He told her, "Whatever you do, don't walk anywhere, just drive." She was like
"Why?" And he said "If you walk outside, people will just stop and kick your ass. It's just part of
the culture." That's true. I really hated it there. Everyone was so saccharine sweet, all these scary
suburban people. It's not hard for me to see how Nazi Germany was like after living there. Everyone's
got their nose in your business. If you're not a football player you're a "queer", therefore worthy of
getting your ass kicked. And if you show any kind of intelligence or ability to think for yourself,
you must be beaten up.
MRR: Did your attitudes change when you moved to N.Y.?
T: I spent the '80s getting politicized by working for companies. I became more moderate,
"'I’ll see how this works": At that time, I viewed capitalism as being this incredibly effective, perfect
machine - ruthless, but efficient. I was working as an investment banker, kept getting promoted and by '90
was a loan officer - my next promotion would've been assistant vice-president if I hadn't quit. I really saw
the inside, and that's when I realized that, in fact, capitalism is an incredibly inefficient, ego-driven,
bullshit-driven. It’s no different than Stalinism was in Russia. It was driven by greedy, stupid assholes.
MRR: Do you think there's a difference between American capitalism and Japanese capitalism?
T: There are some stylistic differences, but they are both concerned with the idea that some
people are better than others and entitled to live better than others - something I'm fundamentally opposed to.
But the Japanese do have some things that if I were an American capitalist I would want to emulate.
Like, their disparity of wealth is a lot lower. In a typical Japanese corporation, a CEO will make
about $200,000 a year, even at a huge company, and the lowest paid mailroom clerk might earn $20,000,
a difference of 10 times. At one of the companies I worked at on Wall St, Bear Stearns, the CEO made
$40,000,000 and I made $8,000. It's a real prescription for revolution here. It's a lot easier to
keep the natives happy in Japan.
MRR: Do you envision a time when people will think?
T: People think, and I like most people. But when you start talking politics,
most people are stupid. They realize that everything is so sucky and so hopeless that they shut down,
are so depressed. If history shows anything, it's that nothing lasts forever. This will not last.
MRR: But what will it cost? What comes after? I always hope that this system will destroy
itself, but I'm afraid that all I see emerging from that is fascism.
T: It's there already. The Right is ready and the Left is just wanking off, that's the thing I don't like.
All my friends are in favor of gun control; I'm totally opposed to it. How are we going to beat off the
fascists when the crunch comes if we don't have guns. They laugh at me, but that's a real problem, a real
tactical issue. There could never have been a French resistance if they didn't have guns.
MRR: I always had faith that there were certain checks in place that could deter the old-fashioned steamroller fascism, like unions, etc., but there doesn't seem to be much in the way anymore.
T: No, there doesn't. I think most people really feet like they don't have what it takes
to rule, and they want someone to tell them what to do. People like to be controlled, even in a love
relationship, it's really convenient if someone knows what movie to see or concert to go to, where to eat.
It's comfortable, but after a while you should get a little nervous and twitchy and want out. That's what
I'm counting on. Plus, you don't need everybody. Ninety percent of the people are assholes, but 90% have
always been assholes. Look, one winter in NY, my landlord decided he was going to save money and we didn't
have heat. I organized a rent strike. My roommates said I can't do that because I'd never get all 14
apartments to participate. I agreed, there was no way, but even with just 5 we'd get the landlord's
attention. In fact, we got 8 and got everything we wanted. It took 4 months to go to court back and
forth, but it paid off. Not only did we get the heat turned back on but we got rebated 3 months rent.
You don't need everybody.
MRR: In our current political malaise, what do you focus in on like a laser?
T: With Newt Gingrich, in some ways he's very boring, just Reagan and Bush continued,
because Clinton has been such a loser president. At the same time, it's the smugness.. it's interesting to
see the Speaker of the House as acting President. It's the abdication of the Presidency, which is something
we've never seen, not even in the final days of Richard Nixon. Gingrich was in a nationally televised
speech, I sure don't remember Tip O'Neill having a nationally televised speech with a Republican response!
It's an interesting situation, a shadow presidency, like a schism in the old Holy Roman Empire where you
had five Popes or three Kings of the same country. It's very odd, and I think it's the beginning of the
end. Everything seems to be spiraling to a conclusion. Homelessness used to be just a nuisance if you
were an insensitive conservative and a tragedy if you were a liberal, and now it's a huge social problem.
There are 10 million homeless in the US, one out of every 25 of us. Then there's the demonization of
blacks, the obsession with building jails to house our young people instead of schools. We're throwing
away our young people. When I was a kid I felt that nobody cared about me, but now we say it! It's
considered OK to cancel school lunch programs, cuz that's cool because you're saving the taxpayer money.
These people are out of their minds! Meanwhile we're clinging to an incredibly outdated ideology. There's
no way it's going to save us. The popular culture is bankrupt. though it's interesting that some film
is getting better. Look at "Pulp Fiction", a mainstream film that is so nihilistic yet existential.
Throughout all the chaos that takes place in it, there are no authority figures appearing, no cops,
nothing interferes with them. Only their own decisions impact themselves. It's a statement on how
young people don't see authority. I went to Belize, a country without any kind of central authority.
There’s the capital, where the police station is, and the rest of the country is dirt poor, with subsistence
farmers living in the jungle. There are no street signs because there's no one to put them up. The maps don't
make sense because the roads are made by whoever lives nearby and needed a road to get to their town.
There was a tool booth on this bridge, and sometimes there was someone there and sometimes there wasn't.
It wasn't a government employee; it was whoever needed money. There is no authority. The currency -
anything goes. No schools, no sewage system, no phones. I asked what happens if someone steals something.
They said they used to call the police in Belize City, who'd drive out. They drive 6 hours on really bad roads,
getting all drunk, and by the time they arrived they were ready to kick ass. They'd shoot people at
random, and no one wanted to call them anymore. They caused more chaos than what they were coming to
solve. Now, they just deal with it themselves, and it works. It's the model for anarchy and it works.
No one's starving, they have little plots, but there's no regulation, no one who says I own this land
and you don't. I think that's what we're moving towards. The choices you make are up to you. The
President has abdicated, the cops have abdicated, and the Congress has abdicated and aren't leading,
just trying to save their skins while working for the corporations. The corporations aren't leading;
they’re just trying to make money for their executives. The family structure is dead. All the
institutions are bankrupt. It's like one of those "Tales From The Dark Side" where the guy won't
admit that he's dead even though his face is falling off. I think this country died quite some
time ago, and I can't say I'm terribly sad about it. I just wish we could get over it and move on to
the next thing... and that not be fascism. But if it is fascism, let's get that out of the way too.
We're already dealing with so many fascistic tendencies as it is, like in Montana they tried to pass a
law that required gays to register at their local police station because sodomy is against the law there.
Registering people at the local police station was always the first step before rounding people up and
putting them in cattle cars to send them not so far away to be burned up. I see a lot of that here.
There's a quote that goes something like "In England, fascism will come in a bowler hat". In the US,
it will come in a baseball cap. The tendencies have always been here. It's always been a very
reactionary country, a selfish country, full of people who stole it from the people who were here in the
first place as violently as imaginable and then ever since then have been fighting over the spoils of what
they’ve stolen. They’re like a bunch of thieves after a bank heist. It's a scary time, what with the
Speaker of the House looking for socialists on the editorial boards of newspapers. I wish they were
socialists! Believe me, they’re not! I'd have a job right now! They're very middle-of-the-road conservatives,
which is unfortunate because these are not middle-of-the-road times.
MRR: One last thing; any advice for young cartoonists? For instance, do you use a computer at all?
T: I don't think the technology is good enough yet. I could scan the drawings in
and do the shading that way. But it's a very tactile process. I use scratch boards. You draw
the cartoon first using India ink, then you scratch out using a sharp tool to make the white lines
on the side that give it a woodcut look. Then you put the ziptone down and use a razor blade in a
precision manner. Then you go back and fill in anything that the ziptone lifted up. But it's fun,
and when you're done you've got ink all over your hands, it's fun! Other than that, I just advise
people to get their work out there, do mass mailings. I had a job in a mailroom and used the postage
meter to send out thousands of things. Years afterwards, I was getting responses. Keep bombarding them.
You'll pile up rejection letters, but keep at it. Keep creating. During those years when I stopped drawing,
it would have been no big deal to have killed myself. That's what I don’t understand about Cobain
because he was still creating.
MRR: Yeah. But you weren't married to Courtney Love.
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