The man behind
If it looks like a conservative duck, acts like a conservative duck and quacks like a conservative duck, then it must be Mallard Fillmore.
The web-footed star of the hard-hitting and unremittingly conservative strip by that name, which runs in about 400 U.S. newspapers, including the Trib, is the creation of Bruce Tinsley.
Tinsley, a soft-spoken father of two boys, draws the strip out of his home in central Indiana. As its growing number of fans already know, it features the sleeves-rolled-up Mallard working stories "that generally aren't widely reported in the liberal media, like the U.N. sex-for-food scandal."
His treatment of the scandal, involving United Nations peacekeepers trading food for sex in famine-stricken countries, exemplifies his sharp humor.
One strip referred to the supposed peacekeeping body as "the corrupt, American-hating thugs in New York." There has been an odd recurring icon in these U.N.-related strips: a small, blue helmet. Tinsley sarcastically calls it the "blue helmet of peacefulness."
Tinsley agrees that Mallard Fillmore is stronger stuff than most readers are used to seeing on their comics pages. "I like to see Mallard go on the op-ed pages," says the Louisville, Ky., native who started publishing the strip in a Virginia paper 20 years ago.
Tinsley says he gets a lot of e-mail response to his strips -- and it's usually either "nice or nasty."
On occasion, however, his strips have been pulled by squeamish, hand-wringing editors.
One recent strip, for example, showed Mallard, who sometimes wears a stereotypical reporter's snap-brim hat, reporting from a call center. "Welcome to The New York Times automated call center," the message states. Then Tinsley twists the knife as the message continues: "If you'd like to hear this message in English, then you're probably an intolerant, jingoistic, knuckle-dragging bigot who also wants to pollute the environment and beat up puppies."
Which topics are the most politically charged?
"It's usually race or gender," says Tinsley, adding, "If you don't know how to rebut an argument, say that it's racist."
Tinsley admits a few political arguments erupt in his own household as well. After all, his wife of 20 years, Arlette, is a "liberal civil rights lawyer." Tinsley can't resist adding, "I know that's redundant."
Because of editors' fretfulness at some of his client newspapers, Mallard has evolved into the only comic strip that regularly includes footnotes.
"Liberal readers and editors are constantly accusing me of making up some of these stories," Tinsley explains. "So I use the asterisks, although they do often interfere with the strip's comic timing."
"This is my asterisk," the reporter duck explained in one strip, breaking through the "third wall," as Mallard regularly does, to address the reader directly.
In the next panel, a smaller asterisk preceded this footnote: "98 percent of people who accuse conservative duck reporters of making up data are hamster-brained ideologues."
For many conservatives, Mallard "is the anti-Doonesbury," the well-established liberal strip that runs in about 1,400 papers, more than triple Mallard's reach. Tinsley says cartoonist Garry Trudeau has the easier job.
"Trudeau's making fun of stuff that's in the news every day. I look for the stuff that gets lost or ignored in the liberal press."
Tinsley also says "Trudeau and the aging hippie crowd are the dominant media culture today. That's why conservatives have an uphill battle of getting their point of view into mainstream media."
The same newspapers he lampoons are often the sources for his best cartoons.
Critics say Tinsley's serious approach to news stories doesn't belong on the comics page.
"I hear all the time that having a talking duck discussing an issue trivializes it," says Tinsley. "But a comic strip is the perfect place to deal with topics of a serious nature. Trudeau deals with that all the time."
Tinsley does admit that some subjects are awfully hard to handle. "The comics page has been called the last G-rated medium. So how do you deal with, say, Monica Lewinsky in a cartoon?
"When I tried to, even some conservatives came after me, saying things like, 'Hey, my grandson reads that.'"
Then there are the issues Tinsley would prefer not to deal with at all. The war in Iraq may be the best example. It's noticeably absent from Mallard Fillmore.
"I've never supported the war," says Tinsley, perhaps surprisingly.
So what's the ideological core of Mallard?
"It's the idea of personal responsibility -- an idea we're getting farther and farther away from," he says.
W.A. Mann is a syndicated media critic who writes the humor column for the Dow Jones investment Web site MarketWatch.com. This profile is adapted from a longer commentary that originally appeared in NewsMax magazine ( www.NewsMax.com ). Copyright 2006 NewsMax Media Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
