Art & Creativity Quote by Ted Rall

A working cartoonist admitting he still can’t quite pull off a “good graphic novel” is less self-flagellation than a quiet flex about what the form demands. Ted Rall isn’t talking about learning to draw; he’s talking about the gap between being competent in parts of the craft and mastering the whole machine. The phrasing matters: “rank my skills” sounds like a practical, almost clinical inventory, the way professionals actually think when deadlines and editors are real. Then he pivots to the prestige object of the comics world: the graphic novel, a format that’s become shorthand for ambition, literary seriousness, and cultural legitimacy.

The subtext is an argument against the myth that one medium is just a longer version of another. A daily strip, a political cartoon, a gag panel, a memoir comic, a long-form narrative: each has different muscles. Rall’s line deflates the outsider assumption that comics are “easy” because they’re visual. A graphic novel requires sustained structure, pacing across chapters, character continuity, and the patience to let images do narrative labor without a punchline bailout. Admitting he has “a long way to go” is also a refusal of the brand-era pressure to pose as fully formed. It’s a craftsman’s humility, but it’s pointed humility: he’s implicitly elevating the graphic novel as a high bar, not a marketing label.

Contextually, it lands in an industry where “graphic novel” is both an artistic goal and a bookstore category that confers seriousness. Rall uses that cultural ladder to remind readers: expertise is modular, and mastery is earned the slow way.