Mallard Fillmore and Doonesbury

By Joe Spear
Free Press Editor

Readers of The Free Press print edition may notice that longtime comic strip Doonesbury now has an ideologically diverse partner on the opinion page.

Mallard Fillmore is a politically-oriented comic strip we have been running above Doonesbury in the Monday through Saturday editions. It is billed as a politically conservative strip and we've added it to provide readers with a little more variety of political viewpoints in terms of comic strips and cartoons.

The strip has been around since 1994 and is in 400 newspapers nationwide.

Here's how Mallard's distribution syndicate King Features describes the comic strip.
"Mallard Fillmore first hatched from the pen of Bruce Tinsley at The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Va.

Today, the celebrated comic strip about Tinsley's conservative reporter-duck fills the bill in nearly 400 newspapers nationwide.

Distributed by King Features Syndicate since 1994, readers of newspapers across the country enjoy the duck's right-wing viewpoint.

Tinsley created Mallard for what he saw as the conservative underdog. The strip is for "the average person out there: the forgotten American taxpayer who's sick of the liberal media and cultural establishments that act like he or she doesn't exist," he says.

"Mallard" almost did not see the light of day. When asked to come up with a mascot for The Daily Progress entertainment section, artist Tinsley showed editors three ideas: a blue hippopotamus; a big nose in tuxedo and cane; and a duck.

Tinsley says the hippo went unused for fear of offending overweight people, and the nose was axed because it would "offend people of Jewish and Mediterranean descent, not to mention Arabs and anyone else with a big nose." Tinsley says he thought his editors were kidding, but they were not.

Once Mallard Fillmore was off and running, his editors requested Tinsley tone down its conservative bias. When he refused, he was fired.

The strip caught the attention of The Washington Times, which used Tinsley's wise-quacking journalist in the commentary section before moving the strip to the comics pages. The rest, as they say, is history."

Always interesting insight into how editors view comic strips.

 Have only a couple of comments so far from readers on the new strip. One only saw the first couple of days and decided it was "another liberal" comic strip. I informed him otherwise and told him to keep watching.

It should be apparent by now to many that Mallard does have a right wing point of view.

Another said it provides what he thought was a fitting contrast to Doonesbury, being Doonesbury is more subtle and clever and Fillmore is more loud and unsubtle by frequent use of capital letters.

In any case, let us know what you think of the new comic strip.