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."]

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."