One Mallard that’s provoking a flap

To paraphrase the old bar joke, cartoonist Bruce Tinsley is a man who walks around with a duck on his head. Maybe not so much on his head as in his head -- and heart.

And no matter where they go, the pair often feel like a duck out of water. The bird is named “Mallard Fillmore,” an ex-newspaper reporter now working for WFDR-TV in Washington, D.C., where his conservative politics ruffles the feathers of his liberal superiors.

Tinsley, 45, is also an ex-newspaper reporter now syndicating his duck-starring comic strip to more than 420 newspapers -- it debuts Monday in The Times -- in which his unabashedly right-wing cartoon has been canceled and later reinstated dozens of times over its decade-long syndication. Tinsley’s black-inked alter ego has gotten him fired and made him the target of bags full of hate mail, even death threats.

On the comic pages, where it runs in most papers, the strip stands out like George W. Bush at a Michael Moore movie screening. Mallard has satirized Democratic candidate John Kerry, defended the war in Iraq and railed against the strangling burdens of taxation. Conservative America celebrates him as its answer to left-wing strips such as “Doonesbury” and, most recently, “The Boondocks.”

But no less a topic than politics is political correctness and what Tinsley regards as its big-footed romp across the American cultural landscape. Mallard’s sensitive snout sniffs out and lampoons its influence practically everywhere, on college campuses, in society’s dietary obsessions and among Hollywood celebrities, to name just a few.

In one series a month after 9/11, Tinsley dispatched little Mallard, alone and unarmed, into the proverbial lion’s den: “This is Mallard Fillmore reporting from behind enemy lines,” the cartoon panel began. “A few hundred yards from where hard-line zealots pump young recruits full of hatred for western culture -- here on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley.”

Even though for much of his life a Republican has occupied the White House, Tinsley always seems to have felt out of step politically with his times, from high school to his newsroom stints. Living among the liberals, he came to believe their default position was that being educated and sophisticated meant being unilaterally critical of America.

“I’ve spent most of my life in places where there haven’t been a lot of conservatives,” said Tinsley, who lives with his wife and two children in the Indianapolis area.

“My high school teachers were burned-out hippies, and college just multiplied that experience exponentially, and then I went into journalism.”

Readers can witness Tinsley’s revenge on his former instructors in recent strips dealing with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. While Tinsley is appalled and embarrassed by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, his comic blasted the media for “relishing showing the pictures over and over and over again.”

In one strip, Mallard hears that major networks CBS, ABC and CNN are suing one another for the right to show an abused Iraqi prisoner next to their station logo. In another, Mallard hears an announcer say, “Up next, we’ll look back at the cruel, barbaric beheading of Nick Berg ... and why it’s all America’s fault.”

But nothing brings in the hate mail, Tinsley said, as when he takes on race and gender issues. In the past year, he did one series espousing his view that black children had overly indulgent television watching habits and another one opposing affirmative action programs at the University of Michigan.

“I’m fascinated by the way otherwise rational people get about race,” Tinsley said. “To say that the son of a black doctor and lawyer who make over $300,000 a year get a break over an Asian kid whose parents are janitors is racist in the worst way to me.”

To Matt McAllister, an associate professor of media studies at Penn State: “Mallard has really come at the right time. He explicitly takes the conservative side, and the public has been hungry for that. He’s the Fox network of comic strips.”

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Keeping the comics comic

Traditionally, hot-button subjects such as politics and religion are kept off comics pages through a combination of cartoonist self-editing and newspapers themselves, said M. Thomas Inge, a professor of English at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., who has written extensively about comics and culture. Readers usually expect the comics to be primarily feel-good, escapist entertainment, and the shock of controversy can lead to reader alienation and canceled subscriptions, Inge added.

Naturally, there have been and are exceptions, but they are few and far between. For some reason, most of them -- such as Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” and Berkeley Breathed’s “Bloom County” -- have values typically associated with liberal politics. Newspapers today are trying to balance political voices on the comic pages, adding another conservative one called “Prickly City” by Scott Stantis, which The Times will start running next month.

But some critics question whether conservatives or liberals can be humorous enough to earn a place on the funny pages. “It’s very difficult to be consistently witty when dealing with political issues,” McAllister said. “I don’t think Mallard is very funny.”

Conservatives offer another reason for their scarcity: the liberal-dominated media. It’s a long-standing charge that has hovered over newsrooms at least since the Watergate scandal, and it received a boost of validation after a recent survey found that almost twice as many local journalists -- and nearly five times as many national ones -- identified themselves as liberal compared with those who called themselves conservative. The survey by the Pew Research Center reported in May that 34% of the national press and 23% of the local press said they were liberal, compared with 7% and 12%, respectively, for conservatives.

But while Mallard may be the only overtly and widely read conservative strip, it swims in a sea where the undercurrent of conservatism runs deep and strong, McAllister counters. “Strips like ‘Family Circus’ and ‘Blondie’ all have a normative view of the family and how people should behave. I think it’s naive to think politics and ideology don’t get filtered into comics, and most of that is conservative.”

A huge fan of Al Capp and his “Li’l Abner” strip, Tinsley credits journalist, writer and author William F. Buckley for being his guiding light. “He’s hilarious and brilliant,” Tinsley said. “Best of all, by invoking his name under any circumstances, I could make my high school and college teachers lose their lunches. I later discovered that it also works in newsrooms and Starbucks.”

Ironically, but for the pox of liberalism upon the land, Mallard might not ever have gotten his wings; at least he would have been a completely different animal. A blue hippo, to be exact.

At the Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Va., Tinsley was asked to draw a mascot for the paper’s entertainment section. He showed his editors three ideas. They shot down the blue hippo because one editor said it would offend fat women. (Tinsley claims his hippo was gender neutral.) Then his big nose was nixed because it might offend people of Jewish and Mediterranean descent, not to mention Arabs and anyone else with a big nose.

“At first I thought they were kidding, second that they were crazy,” he said. Finally, approval was granted to Mallard -- whose name is a play on the nation’s obscure 13th president, Millard Fillmore, who by the way was a member of the Whig Party, not the GOP, which wouldn’t be founded until 1854.

Don’t get Tinsley wrong; he loves liberals. At least one, anyway -- his wife, Arlette. In what would be a cliche setup for a sitcom, Tinsley, the nationally syndicated self-avowed Reagan Republican, is wedded to a civil rights attorney every bit as liberal as he is conservative.

They began arguing about politics on their first date two decades ago -- the topic was Walter Mondale’s candidacy -- and they haven’t stopped since. (She loves Howard Dean; he questions the Vermont governor’s sanity.)

“I honestly wouldn’t say we argue. We discuss issues,” said Arlette Tinsley, 38. “He really is an excellent listener, and I’m usually the one that says, ‘OK, I can’t talk about this anymore.’ ”

Then, she added, “Of course, he’s absolutely, totally wrong most of the time too.”

Neither one seems to have had much luck in politically converting the other, except on one topic -- capital punishment. He used to be all for it, but now, because of his wife and his Christian faith, he admits he’s wrestling with it.

“She is, for the record, the smartest, most thoughtful liberal I’ve ever met,” Tinsley said. “But as Bill Buckley once said, “Isn’t that on the order of celebrating the tallest building in Wichita, Kan.?”