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today is ted rall obsession day

Sometimes I think Rall started a blog just to piss me off.

Now, he's going off on Art Spiegelman.

Today's New York Times puff piece on comix underachiever Art Spiegelman (Maus, bad New Yorker covers, nothing else worth mentioning) started me thinking about how artists work around their shortcomings. People like me, who have no shortage of ideas but aren't the best draughtsmen around, end up doing smart, wordy cartoons for alternative newspapers using styles that allow us to avoid having to do a lot of detailed rendering. In other words, we work around our drawing handicaps.

Honey, you are not only artistically handicapped, but your writing makes you seem mentally handicapped as well.

Then he says this about Chris Ware:

[People] can't imagine that such an accomplished artist could be so bereft of original--hell, any--thought.

Pot, kettle. Has Rall not heard about my Four-Trick-Pony theory? For the past two years - at least - he has said the same things over and over again. How original is saying "Bush stole the election" with stick figure men ad infinitum?

Rall says that artists like himself "end up doing smart, wordy cartoons for alternative newspapers." Yea, I know people like that, Ted. Most of them still live in mom's basement and bag groceries on the weekends for extra cash. The rest of them manage to get published in places besides papers that only would-be anarchists read.

So a world divided between idea people and art people has become a world divvied up between smart people who can't draw and dumb people who can. Bee-utiful.

Rall overestimates himself here, and truly underestimates Spiegelman. Even Art's hard-cover comics for kids show more originality and humor and intelligence than Rall could come up with even if he sat on his ass for three days straight while simultaneously channeling Einstein and the seven muses.

FREE DIRTY DANNY!

Comments

Let's not forget that it was Rall's sniping at Spiegalman that started the fight with Dirty Danny. There's a reason the Durty Danny fund has gotten cartoonists lining up to help it, while most of the cartooning world wouldn't urinate on an ablaze Rall.

Ted Rall is not only a commie asshole but he is an untalented twerp. An ambisexual walnut. Spiegelman, if Maus was the only thing he ever did will be immortal due to the quality of that magnificent tome. I say it again, Ted Rall is an asshole communist.

Sorry for the redundancy...

and another thing...

...has become a world divvied up between smart people who can't draw and dumb people who can. Bee-utiful.

Note for the Left: PLEASE keep up the "We're smart/Everyone else is dumb" snobbery. It makes marginalizing you that much easier and more fun.

Ryaman, this is where my background as former hard-core San Francisco lefty comes in. Let me explain it for you this way: if the Left gave up the message "we're smarter than you," there would be nothing left. The Left doesn't have more fun, doesn't have higher ideals, doesn't have more power, doesn't have a bolder vision, doesn't have empirically verifiable theories, and doesn't have more money. So all it's got is Mark Morford and Noam Chomsky telling you that everyone else is stupid.

Oddly, they find that comforting.

Dude, why even link him if you don't like him? Make him vanish into thin air.

Let's see, Art Spiegelman wrote two heart-wrenching books about his father's horrifying experiences during and after the Nazi Holocaust. He exposed his ambivalence about his father, while still managing to humanize him and even managed to expose his readers to the horrors that people faced during that awful period.

Ted Rall attacks America at every opportunity, criticizing everything while advocating nothing. He snipes from the back row about how the whole world is wrong. I've never felt any connection to his cartoons, nor have my beliefs ever been challenged in the slightest.

Seems clear to me that Mr. Spiegelman stole his Pulitzers from Mr. Rall.

I demand a recount.

F-ing Asshat Rall.

"So a world divided between idea people and art people has become a world divvied up between smart people who can't draw and dumb people who can. Bee-utiful."

Must be a typo. Smart people who CAN draw (Bill Watterson), and dumb people who CAN"T (that would be...).

I judge a man by what he does, not by what someone says.

So a world divided between idea people and art people has become a world divvied up between smart people who can't draw and dumb people who can.

JamesF kinda stepped on my punchline (not on purpose of course). I was just gonna say, "Ted, who told you you could draw?"

Rall is just a hateful, bitter, shrill, twerp of a man. What cracks me up is, either you are a serious political opinionator (did I just make that up?) or you are a satirical political cartoonist and NEVER the two shall meet.

It makes my brain hurt to consider Ted Rall trying to bounce back and forth between the two worlds or political cartoons and political Op/Ed pieces. Sadly for Ted he doesn't have enough talent for either, let alone both so he just exposes himself time and time again as a complete idiot whose next original thought will obviously be his first.

Followed the Dirty Danny link. Never thought I'd ever agree with Rall, but he admits he's a humorless dick.

Even a broken clock, etc., etc.

Re: Ted Rall, I've said it before and I'll say it again:

NO WONDER DADDY DIDN'T LOVE YOU.

Don't F**K with Art Spiegelman!

Ted Rall is a pinhead. Everything he says only affirms that fact.

There's Comics Journal thread about an interview Rall did where he once again brings up Speigelman and Ware.

Rall's just envious because Ware kicks his ass artistically all over the place. And I think Rall believes Ware envies him, that he (Ware) aspires to be the type of cartoonist who draws pictures where everyone has the same big nose.

Speaking of Ware, I recently purchased "Quimby the Mouse." The artwork is mesmerizing.