Daily Inspiration Quote by Ted Rall

Ted Rall is pushing back against the critical reflex to build a canon by bulldozing everything outside it. “Comics are too big” isn’t just a descriptive claim about a sprawling medium; it’s a warning flare. When an art form is this diverse in format, audience, and ambition, any attempt to declare a single genre “better” doesn’t read like discernment so much as gatekeeping with a veneer of taste.

The clever move is how he shifts the argument from aesthetics to ethics. Calling it “wrong morally” sounds provocative until you notice what he’s really indicting: the power play behind “objective” judgment. Objectivity here functions as a credential, a way to turn personal preference into policy. Once critics, publishers, awards committees, or fan cultures treat certain comics as inherently superior (the tasteful graphic novel, the “literary” memoir, the prestige imprint), they don’t just elevate; they erase. Rall’s phrase “cuts out stuff that’s good” frames exclusion as collateral damage, not a neutral sorting mechanism.

There’s also a practical, inside-baseball context: cartoonists have long watched whole categories of work (gag strips, genre books, kids’ comics, webcomics) treated as unserious by institutions that reward a narrow idea of sophistication. Rall isn’t banning judgment; he’s demanding intellectual honesty about where judgment comes from. Say you love what you love. Just don’t launder it into a universal rule that shrinks the medium to your comfort zone.