Daily Inspiration Quote by Ted Rall

Ted Rall’s line is a quiet rebuke to a certain kind of cultural gatekeeping: the reflex to judge comics by how closely they mimic the prestige markers of the novel. By insisting he doesn’t “think about literary prose,” Rall draws a hard boundary around medium-specific craft. He’s not denying language; he’s rejecting the idea that good comics must audition for the approval of prose culture.

The phrasing matters. “Put together” sounds almost mechanical, like editing a machine into working order. That’s apt: graphic novels are engineered experiences, assembled from pacing, panel rhythm, composition, negative space, and the choreography between image and text. “Literary prose” is a loaded term here, a stand-in for a hierarchy where sentence-level elegance gets treated as the main event. Rall flips the value system. For him, the unit of meaning isn’t the sentence, it’s the sequence. The punchline isn’t a pretty paragraph; it’s the turn of a page, the beat between panels, the pause you can’t get in pure text.

The subtext is also defensive in a smart way: comics have spent decades being praised with backhanded compliments (“It’s like a real book!”). Rall’s stance refuses that conversion therapy. He’s arguing that storytelling isn’t the consolation prize when you’re not doing “serious” writing; it’s the core discipline, and comics demand it relentlessly because every panel is a choice about time, attention, and emotion.

Contextually, it lands in the long, ongoing fight for comics to be evaluated on their own terms, not as prose with pictures attached.