The last Six Minutes of Doomed Flight 411
Killed by McSweeney's, but I think they were wrong. Editor Dave Eggers thought it wasn't "whimsical" enough.
Judge for yourself.
Dubious Liberators: Allied Plans to Occupy France, 1942-1944
My 1991 honors thesis at Columbia University. Supervised by Vichy France expert Professor Robert O. Paxton (most recently known for "The Anatomy of Fascism"), this reflects extensive archival research about FDR's attempt to impose military occupation upon France at the end of World War II.
Ted Rall was commissioned to draw special cartoons for Time magazine from 1998 until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. An editor informed him that "no one is interested in humor anymore." He was in a rotation with three other cartoonists—Mike Luckovich, Don Asmussen and the creators of "Cultural Jet Lag."
Here is an archive of Ted's cartoons for Time.
Fortune Magazine Archives
Ted drew cartoons for Fortune magazine every two weeks during the late 1990s. The gig began bizarrely, when a junior editor called Ted and asked him—out of the blue—why he hadn't turned in that week's cartoon yet. He gamely asked for specs and a price, and started drawing. The arrangement lasted more than two years. An archive of those cartoons, remarkable for their
content in this particular venue, is available here.
The Dingles
Back in 1993, a small syndicate asked me to develop a daily and Sunday comic strip for distribution to
daily newspapers. At the time, my editorial cartoons weren’t selling well, and I saw strips as a low-brow
means of supplementing my income. The problem was, however, that my plan to "sell out" failed as I worked
on the thing—I just didn’t have the heart to draw something I didn’t really like myself.
After six months of development, the results were a strip called "The Dingles," a strip about the trials and
tribulations of a nuclear family in the throes of constant disintegration. My idea was to see if I could
do for the comic form what Devo did for music—set up a scenario where things were constantly getting
worse, not better. I finished nearly four months of the strip, and aside from problems with the drawing
style and the narrow graphic constraints of the comic format, I was pretty happy with the results.
The tiny syndicate tried to sub-contract it out to one of the majors in 1994, but didn’t succeed in doing
so before my one-year contract with them expired. Then, in 1996, my editorial cartoon contract with
Chronicle Features was about to expire. Chronicle offered me a United Media deal for "The Dingles" if I
would renew, but I decided to go with Universal Press instead. For now and probably forever, "The Dingles" are
on ice. Here, seen for the first (and possibly last) time, is "The Dingles" as they were meant to be
enjoyed, one day at a time.
