Ted Rall

Often called America's most controversial political cartoonist, Ted Rall is a contrarian thinker who is adored, reviled, but rarely ignored. He is also a widely syndicated opinion columnist, radio personality, and war correspondent who has repeatedly traveled to such hot spots as Kashmir Province and Afghanistan. His cartoons and graphic novels have won numerous awards for their honesty, eye for detail and unique point of view.

Setting himself apart from the herd with a unique drawing style and a take-no-prisoners approach, Rall began editorial cartooning in the 1980s with a handful of alternative weekly newspapers whose editors found his photocopied work hanging from lampposts in New York City. In 1991, San Francisco Chronicle began syndicating Rall's semi-daily editorial cartoons with newspapers including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Des Moines Register and Philadelphia Daily News.

Universal Press Syndicate picked up Rall's cartoons in 1996. Today, "the most controversial cartoonist in America" appears in more than 100 newspapers throughout the United States, ranging from MAD Magazine to SF Weekly.

Rall was called "treasonous" by the right-wing Weekly Standard and "anti-American" by The Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial page. The Right Wing News website named him 2003's "Most Annoying Liberal" and he was #15 in Bernard Goldberg's book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. And he's received death threats.

Rall also draws non-political strips for MAD Magazine and cartoon journalism for EurasiaNet, a news website about the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

Four collections of Rall's cartoons have been published: Waking Up in America, All The Rules Have Changed, Search and Destroy and America Gone Wild. He has also authored four award-winning graphic novels: My War With Brian, Real Americans Admit: The Worst Thing I've Ever Done!, 2024, a parody of Orwell's 1984, and The Year of Loving Dangerously, now in development to become a television series. He edited the influential three-volume anthology of edgy alternative weekly political cartoons, Attitude, and wrote the seminal best-selling 1998 "Generation X manifesto," Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.

Rall covered the war in Afghanistan in cartoon form, where his harrowing experience—three of the 44 journalists with whom he traveled were killed—led to the critically acclaimed book To Afghanistan and Back. He released two books of prose during 2004, Wake Up, You're Liberal: How We Can Take America Back From the Right and Generalissimo El Busho.

Rall's recent book, Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East? details analysis of the region in prose and cartoons. His next book, due in September 2010, is The Anti-American Manifesto, an analysis of and prescription for an America in economic and political crisis.