Daily Inspiration Quote by Ted Rall

The line reads like a small act of self-defense from a working cartoonist who’s spent his career swimming in a culture that assumes everything is a remix. Rall’s phrasing is doing two jobs at once: staking out artistic autonomy while admitting, with a wink, that influence is the default setting and consciousness is the only negotiable part.

“I never consciously” is the tell. It doesn’t claim purity; it claims intent. In an ecosystem where audiences and editors love to play spot-the-reference, Rall draws a boundary around deliberate borrowing. That boundary is less about movies per se than about power: film is the prestige medium, the one whose images colonize our imaginations. Saying he doesn’t “work directly influenced” is a refusal to let that hierarchy dictate his cartoons’ visual grammar or comedic timing.

Then comes the escape hatch: “unless I’m doing a parody.” Parody is the socially sanctioned form of theft, the one protected by genre expectations and, often, by law. It’s also a way for a cartoonist to harness movie language without surrendering to it. Parody announces itself; it turns influence into an object you can point at, exaggerate, and cut down to size.

The subtext is craft pride. Cartoons operate on compression: a single panel has to do what a movie does with montage, score, and runtime. Rall is insisting that his jokes aren’t storyboards for someone else’s medium. If cinema is the cultural weather, parody is the umbrella: you acknowledge the downpour, but you stay dry on your own terms.