After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests


Book Description

An unflinching account—in words and pictures—of America's longest war by our most outspoken graphic journalist Ted Rall traveled deep into Afghanistan—without embedding himself with U.S. soldiers, without insulating himself with flak jackets and armored SUVs—where no one else would go (except, of course, Afghans). He made two long trips: the first in the wake of 9/11, and the next ten years later to see what a decade of U.S. occupation had wrought. On the first trip, he shouted his dispatches into a satellite phone provided by a Los Angeles radio station, attempting to explain that the booming in the background—and sometimes the foreground—were the sounds of an all-out war that no one at home would entirely own up to. Ten years later, the alternative newspapers and radio station that had financed his first trip could no longer afford to send him into harm's way, so he turned to Kickstarter to fund a groundbreaking effort to publish online a real-time blog of graphic journalism (essentially, a nonfiction comic) documenting what was really happening on the ground, filed daily by satellite. The result of this intrepid reporting is After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests—a singular account of one determined journalist's effort to bring the realities of life in twenty-first-century Afghanistan to the world in the best way he knows how: a mix of travelogue, photography, and award-winning comics.




Ted Rall


Book Description

Ted Rall is a nationally syndicated political columnist for Creators Syndicate. This is a collection of the very best of Ted Rall from 2014




Cultures of War in Graphic Novels


Book Description

First runner-up for the 2019 Ray and Pat Browne Award for the Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture Cultures of War in Graphic Novels examines the representation of small-scale and often less acknowledged conflicts from around the world and throughout history. The contributors look at an array of graphic novels about conflicts such as the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), the Irish struggle for national independence (1916-1998), the Falkland War (1982), the Bosnian War (1992-1995), the Rwandan genocide (1994), the Israel-Lebanon War (2006), and the War on Terror (2001-). The book explores the multi-layered relation between the graphic novel as a popular medium and war as a pivotal recurring experience in human history. The focus on largely overlooked small-scale conflicts contributes not only to advance our understanding of graphic novels about war and the cultural aspects of war as reflected in graphic novels, but also our sense of the early twenty-first century, in which popular media and limited conflicts have become closely interrelated.




Never Trust a Realist


Book Description




Meet the Deplorables


Book Description

Ripped from the headlines, Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America ventures deep into Red State territory and explores the current shape of our divided country, providing a fresh, first-hand perspective of right-wing subcultures and the mindsets of the so-called “deplorables” who helped propel Donald J. Trump to the Oval Office. In his inimitable Gonzo-style, infiltration journalist HARMON LEON—whose stories have appeared in VICE, Esquire, The Nation, and National Geographic—dons a variety of disguises and goes undercover into the heart of Trump America where his exploits include canvassing door-to-door as a Trump supporter, hanging out with Trump fanatics as they receive free Donald tattoos, demonstrating how easy it is to purchase an assault weapon on Facebook, visiting an anti-Muslim hate group on the same day as a mass shooting, spending time with anti-choice protesters in front of Planned Parenthood, joining a conversion therapy group that tries to “turn” gay men straight, and many, many more. Adding an innovative extra dimension to the book, two-time winner of the RFK Journalism Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist TED RALL enhances the carefully crafted narrative—and connects Leon's audacious accounts to the greater Trump phenomena—with his own distinctive full-color cartoons and insightful analysis, including a poignant epilogue. A necessary read in the time of Trump, this unique collaboration by the formidable team of Harmon Leon and Ted Rall holds up a mirror to modern conservative life and reflects a reality that is outrageous, entertaining, and always illuminating.




The Routledge Companion to Comics


Book Description

This cutting-edge handbook brings together an international roster of scholars to examine many facets of comics and graphic novels. Contributor essays provide authoritative, up-to-date overviewsof the major topics and questions within comic studies, offering readers a truly global approach to understanding the field. Essays examine: the history of the temporal, geographical, and formal development of comics, including topics like art comics, manga, comix, and the comics code; issues such as authorship, ethics, adaptation, and translating comics connections between comics and other artistic media (drawing, caricature, film) as well as the linkages between comics and other academic fields like linguistics and philosophy; new perspectives on comics genres, from funny animal comics to war comics to romance comics and beyond. The Routledge Companion to Comics expertly organizes representative work from a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, literature, philosophy, and linguistics. More than an introduction to the study of comics, this book will serve as a crucial reference for anyone interested in pursuing research in the area, guiding students, scholars, and comics fans alike.




Political Suicide


Book Description

Ted Rall's latest is a no-holds-barred look at the civil war raging within the Democratic Party in the graphic style of his national bestseller, Bernie. There's a split in the Democratic Party. Progressives are surging with ideas and candidates like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 72 percent of Democratic voters are progressives. But centrists like Tom Perez and the Clintons still run the DNC party apparatus--and they don't want to compromise. Intraparty warfare exploded into the open in 2016. It's even bigger now. The struggle goes back decades, to the New Left and the election of Richard Nixon over George McGovern. It continued with the Democratic establishment's quashing of insurgent progressives like Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader and Howard Dean. The vast scale of the DNC's secret conspiracy to stop Bernie Sanders in 2016 nomination came out courtesy of WikiLeaks. Will Democrats again become the party of the working person? Or will the corporatists win and continue their domination of electoral politics? Ted Rall gets to the bottom of the story neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want you to know: how the civil war in the Democratic Party poses an existential threat to the two-party system.




Snowden


Book Description

As many as 1.4 million citizens with security clearance saw some or all of the same documents revealed by Edward Snowden. Why did he, and no one else, decide to step forward and take on the risks associated with becoming a whistleblower and then a fugitive? Rall delves into Snowden's early life and work experience, his personality, and the larger issues of privacy, new surveillance technologies, and the recent history of government intrusion. Rall describes Snowden's political vision and hopes for the future. In a way, the book tells two stories: Snowden's and a larger one that describes all of us on the threshold of tremendous technological upheaval and political change. Snowden is a portrait of a brave young man standing up to the most powerful government in the world and, if not winning, at least reaching a stand-off, and in this way is an incitation to us all to measure our courage and listen to our consciences in asking ourselves what we might have done in his shoes.




Bernie


Book Description

Now a NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, Bernie is the must-have guidebook to the Bernie Sanders campaign -- and the uncompromising candidate behind it. Insightful, funny, and accessible, this biography-in-graphic-novel-form of the presidential candidate explains both his early life and political rise, but also shows the broader political shift that made it possible for a Jewish socialist to rally voters and become a real presidential contender. Political cartoonist and Kennedy Award winner Ted Rall interviewed Bernie Sanders at length for this book and delved deep into his background to create this one-of-a-kind biography. Sanders' upbringing in a struggling working-class family in a hardscrabble section of Brooklyn during the 1950s taught him that poverty is a disease, one that affects us all. Incredibly, the lessons he learned back then are revolutionizing the political process this year, marking the resurgence of political progressivism on the left at the same time as the two-party system seems to be on the way out. From McGovern’s 1972 loss to Nixon to the Occupy movement, Rall shows readers exactly how the American public was primed to embrace a socialist calling for a political revolution. Twice the winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Rall is a political cartoonist, opinion columnist, graphic novelist and occasional war correspondent whose work has appeared in hundreds of publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Village Voice, and Los Angeles Times. He is the illustrator of the full-length comic in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, written by Greg Palast, and the author of After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests among many other books. www.tedrall.com




The Anti-American Manifesto


Book Description

In arguably the most radical book published in decades, cartoonist/columnist Ted Rall has produced the book he was always meant to write: a new manifesto for an America heading toward economic and political collapse. While others mourn the damage to the postmodern American capitalist system created by the recent global economic collapse, Rall sees an opportunity. As millions of people lose their jobs and their homes, they and millions more are opening their minds to the possibility of creating a radically different form of government and economic infrastructure. But there are dangers. As in Russia in 1991, criminals and right-wing extremists are best prepared to fill the power vacuum from a collapsing United States. The best way to stop them, Rall argues, is not collapse—but revolution. Not by other people, but by us. Not in the future, but now. While it's still possible.