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Silk Road to Rall

[Note: It should be mentioned at the top that Ted Rall is the artist on a series of short comics based on the journalism of Greg Palast. Russell Burlingame is a Special Projects Editor for Greg Palast and is helping to arrange a graphic novel based on Palast's work, for which Rall's initial strips—to be published in Hustler magazine starting soon—are part of the buildup. In Rall's words, “What's going on is that it's going to be either a four- or five-month, one page-per-month, about how the election of 2008 has already been stolen, and it's all based on Greg's research. It's really a way to get paid for putting a book proposal together.”]

Ted Rall The number of filmmakers, musicians and comic creators whose fans will insist that their best work came at the beginning of their career is so large as to make the claim a truism in the entertainment industry.

So leave it to political cartoonist Ted Rall to start his graphic novel career with The Worst Thing I've Ever Done. His 1996 graphic novel was the first in a string of books for Rall, whose most recent is Silk Road to Ruin. "I started out in '96 with The Worst Thing I've Ever Done. Then I'd say it's every couple of years--maybe every two or three years," Rall explains. "I haven't done a real, true, 'just' graphic novel since 2004, and right now I'm working on two."

By "just" graphic novel, of course, Rall means to suggest a graphic novel that isn't an offshoot of (or collection from) his popular editorial cartoons. Syndicated in newspapers all over the country, the strip is recognizable by Rall's signature artistic style. Like most political cartoonists, Rall doesn't really have a name for the strip. It isn't, after all, something that follows a particular group of characters or something else that can easily be used to name it. Unlike most American, syndicated political cartoonists, though, Rall's strips are, well, strips. Rather than the single-panel, single-joke political cartoons that run in your local paper, Rall embraces the language of comics and is therefore often shunted off the to comics page rather than the Opinion section. This has resulted in a funny little dance regarding the naming of the strip. "Some alternative weeklies insisted on having a title," Rall explains. "The papers that use a title call it Search and Destroy."

The two graphic novels Rall is currently working on, by the way, are a pair of matched, autobiographical, original graphic novels titled The Year of Living Dangerously and The Year of Chris. While Rall is writing them, and they're about his own life, he says that he's working with other artists on the project because "the subject matter kind of required a different drawing style than mine." Rall jokes that nobody, himself included, wants to see him drawing people naked, for example. The Year of Living Dangerously is therefore being illustrated by Pablo Callejo, and Rall's fellow strip artist Matt Bohrs is going to take over art chores on The Year of Chris. While it might seem strange that a cartoonist who draws his own strips every week is outsourcing the pencilwork on his autobiography, Rall says that he can accept the shortcomings of his own art, and sees himself more as a writer.

Rall also feels that the meticulous study of art isn't as important to cartooning as most people probably think. He quips, “Studying art is very bad training to become a cartoonist, I have to say. Study everything except art. Art's the least important thing about cartooning, but a lot of people don't understand that.”

Back on the subject of his autobiography, Rall explains, "Obviously there's people with more interesting lives than me, but I've had a more interesting life than most people who write graphic novels."

In terms of format, Rall says that the two graphic novels may segue into a third. "They're a sequel and a prequel to the same series," Rall explains. "I decided to do an autobiographical--well, trilogy would be idea. They're going to come out very close together and they're about my key coming-of-age years, when I got expelled, and dumped by my girlfriend, and fired from my job, and evicted and arrested. I got the idea because a lot of people were doing autobiographical graphic novels and quite frankly, most cartoonists haven't had very interesting lives and I have. I read all these reviews about artists who have had incredible angst from sitting around their studios and worrying about dates." Rall's own life story, by his account, deals with entirely different relationship issues, less like worrying about dates and more like going home with women at the end of the night just to have a roof over his head when he was homeless.

In terms of his other works, though, Rall says that his choice of content is often less personal than one might suspect. Books that are not collections of his strips have rarely been developed from Rall's imagination at the start. His 2002 hit graphic novel To Afghanistan and Back was developed at his publisher's prompting shortly after the September 11 attacks. “Like Whoopi Goldberg says, I don't really pick them,” Rall says of his projects. “People come to me usually and propose things. I try to do things that I think would serve some kind of purpose; the ideal project will drive my career forward and make some positive political statement. More often than not, it's either one or the other and sometimes you might have to sacrifice and do something that doesn't seem to pay well or may pay well but is not terribly important politically. As a self-employed creator, I have to both pay bills and try to do something that's fun.”

Rall says that the movement in the larger book market toward taking graphic novels seriously, has helped him work more. “After years of telling me graphic novels were going to be huge, I really started to take it seriously about six months ago,” Rall says. “I was walking through midtown Manhattan looking for a book and I went into four stores and three of the four stores had graphic novel sections right up in front of the stores, rather than back in the humor ghetto.”

“The reality is there wasn't much money in graphic novels up until now,” explains Rall. “You used to see people doing their whole books for $2,000. I would say it's not financially viable for most people, but it's getting to the point where it's starting to be viable.”

He adds that with graphic novels getting more mainstream attention being reviewed more often, his type of material has a little leg up in the market. “When stuff is political and social and it's socioeconomic satire--when it first starts, people are favorably disposed to it,” Rall says, but says that as he's gotten more renowned, he's been getting, on balance, more negative reviews. “What I think that happens is that I think bad reviews are generally a sign of success because when you're starting out and you're obscure, if people don't like you they don't bother to review you at all. If you achieve any kind of notoriety or fame, then people start to feel like, 'We've got to take this guy down.'”

Longer-form works have also proven to be a good excuse for Rall to get out of the studio; Silk Road to Ruin follows in the footsteps of Rall's To Afghanistan And Back in that it chronicles the cartoonist's own journeys in the perilous and chaotic titular region. “I have been obsessed with Central Asia since I was a kid,” Rall says. “My mom got me a subscription to National Geographic when I was a kid and I used to sit in my backyard in Suburban Ohio. I remember one time there was a photo spread of the USSR and it was described as 'the most rugged place on earth' and I remember thinking, 'I'll never get to go someplace like that.'”

Years later, though, Rall got to go there for the first time when he was a feature writer for the now-defunct men's magazine POV. “I was like the Hunter S. Thompson of POV, except without the writing talent,” jokes Rall. He explains that like Thompson's infamous role at Rolling Stone in the 1970s, Rall's niche at POV was to be the reporter who undertook crazy adventures.

“One time I pitched riding the Silk Road and [my editor] was like, 'Do it!'” Rall says. “It was a harrowing experience and I came back 44 pounds lighter and said I'd never do it again, but I couldn't get it out of my head and I kept going back. I've now been there eight times since then.”

Rall explains that the role that many former Soviet republics will play in the future of an America that can't even find them on a map. “I became convinced that this is the most important part of the world as far as Americans are concerned,” Rall says. “There's huge untapped oil reserves; it's a fascinating study of the clash between lingering Soviet totalitarianism and incoming Muslim fundamentalism. A handful of families control billions of dollars in oil while most are sneaking by on $20 a month. I was like, 'Forget the Middle East, that's the 20th Century's problem.'”

Silk Road to Ruin is the fulfillment of more of Rall's professional ambition than any other book he's put together. “When I came back from Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, my publisher convinced me to do a book that became To Afghanistan and Back and he wanted it to come out as quickly as possible and so it's extremely immediate because I started working on it as soon as I came back--but it's also a little slap-dash,” Rall says. “That wasn't what I wanted to write. I wanted to write a book that got into the history, culture and politics of Central Asia, but I knew that was going to take years. I pitched it to my publisher at the time as a project that would probably only do well if some major news happened out of Central Asia.” Rall draws a parallel here to the book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid. Released in early 2001, Rashid's book sold modestly until the September 11 attacks raised the profile of the Middle East in the American media. Shortly after Americans became aware on a large scale of who the Taliban were**, the book—one of the only ones available on the subject at the time—started to fly off the shelves.

Rall says that while it might not translate into dollars or sales, Americans do take an interest in international news and politics when the subject matter is placed in front of them. “I used to do a radio show in Los Angeles and I started doing breaking news from Central Asia,” Rall says. “It started out as a joke on how Americans don't care about foreign news. What I realized was that the joke was on me--people did want to know about it but our media wasn't doing anything about it.”

Still, the general malaise the media feels toward Central Asia has dampened the overall reception for Silk Road to Ruin. “The New York Times didn't review it because they thought it was too hard,” Rall says. “I think it's probably my least-reviewed book and it's ironic because I think it's my best book. Of course, everyone always has a different understanding of their own best book than the publisher does.”

Still, Rall says, despite the arduous research that it took to make Silk Road to Ruin a reality (“There was no way I could have written this one in under a year and it really took three years to write,” Rall says. “This is my Southeast Asia Brain Dump. It's me telling you why you need to care about this region.”), the book explains itself pretty well as it goes. “I thought it needed to be written at a very ninth-grade level, and I think it is,” Rall says.

While he says that he has been disappointed by the lukewarm reception so far, he has high hopes for the book in the long term. “I have to admit it's been disappointing just because I worked very hard on it and I think the book is very good,” Rall says. “It's going to get a second life later this year because it comes out in France and it should do better there--the French have always had an interest in Central Asia.”

Talking about his own interest in Central Asia, Rall admits it's a little odd: “The food's terrible, the hotels are crappy, the police are constantly arresting you and shaking you down for money, the transportations is dicey and some parts are downright dangerous so there's a lot not to recommend it,” Rall says. “But it is an adventure; I'm not into challenging myself physically by climbing mountains and stuff, but this is sort of analogous.”

Rall says that the region's challenges are geological and political, so it kind of hits its visitors on all fronts. “Everything is extreme,” Rall says. “It has the hottest deserts, the coldest mountains. It's got spectacular wealth, spectacular poverty--everything. Central Asia is the future. The US is becoming more like Central Asia, Central Asia is not becoming more like the US. We're getting more used to police checkpoints, to armed guards at the airports. It's a window into a harsher possible future.”

At the same time, he says that riding the Silk Road is an interesting study in emerging societies. “These are countries that are inventing themselves from scratch. When they became independent in 1991, they didn't have any choice in the matter.” Rall adds, “These countries are for the most part artificial constructs--tribal homelands established by Stalin. In reality they were nomadic, they didn't have set boundaries. Suddenly they have to invent the flag and a currency and a history and learn to separate them from each other, and decide who their allies and their enemies are.”

Which is something that Rall feels the US can benefit from considering in a little more depth. “There's a lot of stuff that's in the form of being smart but really isn't--like Obama,” he says. “These last two weeks he's been all about, 'We shouldn't be in Iraq, we should be in Afghanistan. That's where Al Quaeda was!' But it's a lot more complicated than that. Afghanistan was kind of Al Quaeda's back lot.”

Rall says that while Afghanistan is more complex than most American politicians would have us believe, the Central Asian region he covers in Silk Road to Ruin is simply not getting the kind of attention that we'll be forced to give it soon. “at some point people are going to be just blindsided by events that happen out of Central Asia,” Rall says. “It could be the disintegration of the government of [Uzbek President] Islom Karimov, which the US has backed. It's kind of the lynchpin to the entire region. I think any President would be irresponsible not to send troops there if that happened because it's so important to US strategic interests. Something will happen and it may not sell my book, but people will start to pay attention in Central Asia.”

* [Rall indicates about a four-month turnaround from script to bookshelf for the book, which was considered very topical at a time when the US was not yet in Iraq and troops in Afghanistan were routinely on the front pages.]

** [The first time I became aware of The Taliban was on Michael Moore's hilarious Bravo TV series, The Awful Truth, where he hassled their US ambassador—a man with whom Ted Rall has met in the past—and eventually “airlifted TVs to Afghanistan.” Regardless of what you think of the current state of Moore's career and reputation, his early work is absolutely worth checking out]

Russell Burlingame ... Russell is a journalist and graphic novelist currently living in Greenwich Village. He interned at Wizard: The Comics Magazine in the '90s and is currently a Special Projects Editor for Greg Palast Investigations, where he is overseeing a graphic novel for release in summer 2008.