Mallard Fillmore



""I think papers carry this strip for "balance", i.e., to shut up the Doonesbury critics so they can keep it on the comics page."

The Comics Curmudgeon"

Mallard Fillmore, by Bruce Tinsley, is about an anthropomorphic duck journalist and the struggles he finds in dealing with a liberal world. It started out as a non-political strip for The Daily Progress, which had asked Tinsley to create a mascot strip for their entertainment page. After several rejections, the eponymous duck won out and the strip was launched. After Tinsley expressed his conservative political views, he found himself out of a job. He successfully sold the strip to The Washington Times in 1992 and eventually got it syndicated nationally by King Features Syndicate.

This strip provides examples of:


 * Ambiguously Jewish: Mr. Noseworthy strikes one as rather this way, what with his long nose, frizzy hair, and spouting of leftist intellectual gobbledygook. (Then again, maybe the frizzed hair is just supposed to identify him as a Bourgeois Bohemian, and the nose as a sign of superciliousness.)
 * Author Filibuster: The cause of every Wall of Text, mentioned below.
 * Author Tract: Every strip.
 * Dear Negative Reader: Occasionally, Mallard addresses his complaining readership, though it's hard to say if the author is quoting actual e-mails or not.
 * Expy: More than a few critics have noted Mallard's incredible similarity to Opus the Penguin. This is less obvious on the rare days that Mallard's head is colored -- his head is canonically green (being a mallard), but on weekdays, his head is jet black, making the resemblance uncanny.
 * Half Dressed Cartoon Animal: Like many cartoon ducks, Mallard never wears pants.
 * Interactive Narrator: Tinsley occasionally interacts with Mallard, represented as a pair of floating fingers with a pencil.
 * Intrepid Reporter: Technically Mallard, though we don't actually see him doing anything suggesting he researches or sniffs out stories - just that he reports on them.
 * Political Correctness Gone Mad: A frequent target of mockery.
 * The strip started with Mallard going out for a job as a reporter and being declined because he's just a duck. He gets the job by pointing out that he's an "Aquatic-American".
 * Punny Name: The title character is an obvious play on Millard Fillmore.
 * Straw Feminist: This strip has a recurring one, and she's an ugly and bitter hag. Then again, Tinsley also regularly features a brick-brained, glamorous model named Purge Daley, showing that he at least doesn't discriminate against Hollywood Homely women.
 * Strawman Political: There's a few stock characters that to serve this purpose and appear only in strips covering their topic (education, feminism, race, etc.). Outside of these, Noseworthy often plays the role of the smug, line-toeing liberal for Mallard to easily criticize. He's also Mallard's boss, but this is really not an issue outside of the initial strips in which Mallard is hired by him.
 * Wall of Text: Many strips are a pile of word balloons crowding out, at best, a character's head.
 * Women Are Wiser: Mallard's (human!) wife/girlfriend is considerably more reasonable than he is.