Back when the world still cared about Gary Condit (which is to say, not too long ago), the politically conservative comic-strip duck Mallard Fillmore doled out some predictable partisan criticism: "Before the Chandra Levy story, ABC, NBC and CBS usually referred to Congressman Condit's party affiliation! Now 92% of the time, they don't!" Dramatic pause. And then, "I'm not sure whether that reflects their liberal bias or if they just figure that once you say 'intern' and 'affair,' saying 'Democrat' is sort of redundant."
Created by Bruce Tinsley in 1991, Mallard Fillmore runs in about 400 newspapers across the country, including The Washington Times, The Boston Globe, and the New York Post--often next to Garry Trudeau's liberal strip Doonesbury. Its mouthpiece is a duck hired as a television reporter at "WFDR" in Washington, D.C., to fill the station's "Amphibious-American" quota. Mallard typically quacks and moans that government is too big, tax cuts are too small, gun control is too strict, and schools are too lenient. He complains quite specifically about the Democratic Party.
Mallard is crisply drawn and, on occasion, he does surprise--as when, duringthe 2000 presidential primary, he asked Governor George W. Bush to explain hisstance on affirmative action. The reply: "Mallard, if I answer that question, itwon't end there! Next, you'll ask about taxes, or foreign policy! It's a slipperyslope, and I'm not gonna play that game!"
But for the most part, Mallard's jokes are predictably right-wing. Onabortion: "You should probably vote Democratic if you think of your two-year-oldas being in his 'eleventh trimester.'" On affirmative action: "By Super Bowl 37,each team will be required by law to have at least 25% ugly cheerleaders." On theOccupational Safety and Health Administration: "The only safe business is onethat's out of business." Not surprisingly, Mallard took frequent potshots at BillClinton and did not let up even as the president was about to leave office.(Question: "Why is there a two-month gap between the election and theinauguration?" Mallard's answer: "In this case, I'd say that's how long the OvalOffice fumigators requested.") The strip doles out its judgments without thegarnish of even minimally developed plot or character. There is no show, onlytell. There is a word for this, and that word is propaganda.
Mallard snipes most frequently at the supposed liberal media bias: "One thingabout Dan [Rather] . . . he's no Jim Jeffords. . . . Nobody has to worry about him changin' his party affiliation." And: "Good evening. This is Peter Jennings, reminding our viewers that whatever bad news you're about to hear, Reagan and Bush did it too! Now for our top story." Tinsley even groused for a full week over liberal cartoonist Trudeau, whom he protrayed as a Twinkie. (Mallard: "Garry, did you just not bother to verify your assertion that the president's I.Q. is half of Bill Clinton's, or were you just lying?" The Twinkie: "When you make stuff up as often as I do, Mallard, it's not lying, it's a leitmotif!")
Bruce Tinsley's conservative politics, he told The WashingtonTimes, came from attending school in the sixties, when teachers indoctrinated the students about the evils of the Vietnam War. After having to listen to lectures explaining "why Bob Dylan is greater than Shakespeare," Tinsley turned away from his professors--and to the writings of William F. Buckley, whom he describes as his "Jack Kerouac." He even kept his hair short. Tinsley argues that he created Mallard for "the forgotten American taxpayer who's sick and tired of a liberal media and cultural establishment that acts like he or she doesn't exist." Fighting words, sure--but are they accurate?
Not really. The Sunday comics are actually quite conservative as arule. They do not change much over years, even decades. Calvin never graduatedfirst grade, nor did his overqualified classmate Susie Derkins; and Charlie Brownalways fell for Lucy's football prank. The strips are meant to be reassuring, notdaring; safe, not provocative; droll, not biting; Bob Saget, not Chris Rock.
Case in point: Comic-strip families are overwhelmingly nuclear in structure(Calvin and Hobbes, Dennis the Menace, For Better or for Worse), with the father winning the bread and the mother baking it (Hi and Lois, Hagar the Horrible) for a family as white as the picket fence that embraces its middle-class home (Blondie, The Family Circus). Dozens of newspapers suspended For Better or forWorse--and scores of readers defected--after one of its characters came out as gay. When Blondie, wife of Dagwood Bumstead, changed careers from homemaker to caterer (hardly a staggering metamorphosis), the prospect of the wife earning income rocked the marriage so hard that the couple ended up seeing a counselor.
Readers apparently want the comics pages to reflect a 1950s-era status quo;and perhaps with this in mind, comics-page editors have historically been moreresponsive to criticism from the right than from the left. After the September 11attacks, when The Boondocks showed one of the main characters calling the terrorist hotline of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn in suspects helping Afghan extremists ("All right, let's see. . . . The first one is Reagan. That's R-E-A-G . . ."), several papers temporarily stopped publishing the strip. And during the Watergate investigations, papers sometimes refused to run Doonesbury if it commented on the scandals.
"Few crusades are launched on the comics page; few boundaries are breached;few taboos are broken," wrote Jeff Shesol, creator of Thatch in The WashingtonPost. Shesol has liberal credentials--he worked for the progressive Pat Schroeder, and Bill Clinton hired him as a speechwriter in 1998--but even his own cartoon exemplifies the funnies' dedication to tradition and convention. Thatch started at the peak of the "politically correct" movement, when Shesol was a senior at Brown University (the nursery of the movement), and gained momentum by criticizing all that is p.c. The cartoon started showing up in The Wall StreetJournal, and the National Review invited Shesol to do a strip.
Mallard goes about 10 steps further than most Sunday strips and makes politics its focus. It does what conservatives have traditionally been best at doing, especially on talk radio: reducing knotty social arguments to glib, simplistic quips. The format allows Mallard to sneak false analogies and faulty reasoning past readers--an easy thing to accomplish, because only a few panels are used to convey a point, and readers are unlikely to spend more than seconds with them over breakfast. Last year, for instance, Mallard presented "The Liberal Lexicon 2000: stupid stuff we hope they'll stop saying in the new century." He defined terms such as syndrome ("word used to reduce reprehensible actions to mere symptoms of some vague societal ill"), compassion ("sorrow for the troubles of others, accompanied by a strong desire to force somebody else to help them"), and community ("a word liberals put at random into sentences in order to sound enlightened and tolerant").
Doonesbury, to be fair, has long been associated with liberal criticism of conservative politicians; Trudeau is a conservative bête noire. (One 1980s collection of his strips was called In Search of Reagan'sBrain.) And readers have asked their newspapers to place both Doonesbury and Mallard on the editorial page; some publications have complied. But Doonesbury doesn't quite fit with the columns because the strip fleshes out story lines and delves into specific characters' struggles; the commentary is secondary, a backdrop. Mallard, on the other hand, is more of an editorial cartoon, with self-contained one-liners and characters that merely serve to convey political messages. Moreover, Doonesbury is at least some of the time an equal-opportunity satirizer: Plenty of Democrats fall victim to Trudeau's often brilliant wit.
Even as a political cartoon, Mallard is not a vigorous critique of liberal thought but its flip dismissal. Though Jay Kennedy--editor in chief at King Features, which syndicates the strip--has said that Mallard "helps define the issues people are thinking about," the strip really fails in this mission. It does not make for provocative discourse but allows its readers to decline invitations to political debate--and to wallow in snideness. "You should probably vote Democratic," Mallard says, "if: You think Trees can feel pain [showing a man in a "Save the Shrubbery" shirt standing in front of a tree], but unborn babies can't." This fails as substantive criticism--which would be fine, if only it were also funny. But it's simply not. For a cartoon strip that eschews both narrative drive and character development, to fail at both criticism and at humor is deadly. It's time for Mallard to go the way of the dodo.
