Right to Laugh

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 13, 2001 | by Stephen Goode

Bruce Tinsley's "Mallard Fillmore" comic strip is popular across the nation and an example of work by a small but powerful breed of conservative cartoonists.

He dresses simply, usually in a tweed jacket and a striped tie. Sometimes he wears a hat with a press card tucked into the band. Mallard Fillmore is an oxymoron: a working journalist who is a conservative. He bears the mark of it, showing on his face a look of complete exasperation as he confronts the everyday foibles and absurdities of political and cultural liberals, managing in the process to be one of the funniest creatures in the funny papers. This comic-strip duck already is one of the most familiar icons of American conservatism.

That may be just what 42-year-old Bruce Tinsley, Mallard's creator, secretly hoped for when he launched the strip a decade ago, though the modest Tinsley seems as surprised as anyone by the loyal following of his comic strip. Last fall, for example, when the Fort Worth Star-Telegram dropped "Mallard Fillmore" after editors claimed it had received poor scores from a comics survey conducted for the newspaper, a deluge of letters arrived supporting the strip's return in strong terms. Chastised, the Star-Telegram not only brought Mallard back, but also ran the two weeks' worth of cartoons readers had missed.

The same thing happened in 1996, when the Denver Post canceled the strip. "If we are truly committed to rebuilding a society in which we treat each other with respect and civility, even across vast political divides, we don't need a sneering Mallard Fillmore on our pages," sniffed editor Sue O'Brien, explaining the cancellation. Mallard's fans reacted quickly and the cartoon duck was back in the newspaper within days, along with a front-page apology from the Post's top editor.

"Mallard's fans surprised me from the beginning, and they continue to surprise me by writing us in such great numbers," Tinsley tells Insight. "The good news is that his fans expect Mallard every day and want to see him in the paper." Fame runs two ways, however: Tinsley has received death threats from loons irate over his conservative politics and gets a sizable amount of hate mail, an indication that he's reaching people, even if it's only to arouse their anger. (Those death threats lead Insight to omit Tinsley's address, except to say that he lives in a small Indiana town with his wife, Arlette, and two small children.)

"Mallard Fillmore" made its first appearance in a big-city newspaper in 1991 in the Washington Times. Three years later, in 1994, it joined King Features Syndicate Inc., a New York firm, and now appears in 400 newspapers nationwide. That's not a bad showing for a conservative strip in a liberal print-media industry, though the long-established (and very liberal) "Doonesbury" for example, reaches about 1,500 newspapers. Meanwhile, Tinsley has two book-length collections of Mallard cartoons out: Mallard Fillmore and Mallard Fillmore on the Stump.

Jay Kennedy, editor in chief at King Features and a self-described liberal, tells Insight he went looking for a conservative strip. "I felt there was a need for one that didn't line up with Gary Trudeau and `Doonesbury'" he says. Kennedy calls Tinsley and Mallard "a true success story." Even "when readers drastically disagree with him, he helps define the issues people are thinking about."

And that's precisely what Tinsley hoped to do with the strip. He says he sees it as "an information resource readers can rely on." He cites as his job description that he "brings to public attention things Americans don't normally see in the mainstream media and certainly don't see commented on as I do it."

Mallard's ancestors include such great comic strips as Al Capp's "Li'l Abner" and Harold Gray's "Little Orphan Annie," which often commented on the politics of their time. Gray famously killed off his Daddy Warbucks character in "Annie" to protest the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to a fourth term as president, then brought Warbucks back after FDR died.

Still, the closest present-day relatives of "Mallard Fillmore" aren't comic strips, which tend to shy away from politics, but editorial cartoons drawn by such great syndicated artists as Dick Wright [see Picture Profile, p. 36], the Detroit News' Henry Payne and the late great Jeff McNelly of the Chicago Tribune. Editorial cartoonists deal directly with current political and cultural issues, just as "Mallard Fillmore" does. Their work can become "a very integral part of any newspapers they're in" says Los Angeles Times cartoonist Michael Ramirez, commenting on major issues of the day in ways that the average comic strip cannot, a fact Tinsley recognizes. "I always like to see Mallard on the op-ed page" he says. "I don't think it belongs on the comic page."

Interestingly, the qualities that make a great cartoonist haven't changed since Thomas Nast (who gave the Democrats their donkey symbol and the Republicans their elephant) set the standard for modern editorial cartooning after the Civil War in his relentless attacks on Boss Tweed and his Tammany Hall political machine. "A good political cartoonist is a person who has strong opinions" says Wright, whose cartoons appear in more than 300 newspapers, "and