Mallard Fillmore

Right wing comic strip
the political themed comic strip

Mallard Fillmore is a comic strip written and illustrated by Bruce Tinsley until 2019 and Loren Fishman since 2020. It has been syndicated by King Features Syndicate since June 6, 1994. The strip follows the exploits of its title character, an anthropomorphic green plumaged duck who works as a politically conservative reporter at fictional television station WFDR in Washington, D. C. Mallard's name is a pun on the name of the 13th president of the United States, Millard Fillmore.

In 1991, Bruce Tinsley, who was an editorial cartoonist for the Charlottesville, Virginia paper The Daily Progress, was asked to create a cartoon character as a mascot for the newspaper's entertainment page. A duck, which Bruce named "Mallard Fillmore," was accepted, and made his debut in the paper. Tinsley started sending samples of Mallard Fillmore, then known as The Fillmore File, to newspapers across the country and was eventually picked up by The Washington Times, which began running it in 1992. The strip was later picked up for national syndication by King Features Syndicate, which began distributing it in May 1994. After November 23, 2019, Mallard Fillmore stopped updating with new content and instead reprinted old comics. Since March 9, 2020, new comics of Mallard Fillmore have been produced under the signature of a different artist, Fishman.

In the 2004 book America (The Book), written by the staff of The Daily Show, a parody of Mallard Fillmore appears in a section about political cartoons (which also included parodies of Peanuts and Doonesbury strips). In the parody, Mallard criticizes legislation protecting the environment, as well as the income tax, and concludes "Ooops! I forgot to tell a joke!" In the strip's 5–8 July 2005 editions, Tinsley responded to the America (The Book) parody, claiming that Jon Stewart "tried to deceive people into thinking it was a real [Mallard Fillmore strip]" by using the comic's name and a fictitious date. The 2006 paperback "Teacher's Edition" of America (The Book) further addresses this controversy. On the page with the Mallard strip, Stanley K. Shultz, a college professor hired to correct factual inaccuracies in the book, remarked that "This does not appear to be an authentic 'Fillmore' cartoon, although the authors of this book have captured accurately the strip's level of humor." The Daily Show staff worked in another jab at the comic strip in Earth (The Book), where the strip Love Is is referred to as "a creepy cartoon that makes Mallard Fillmore look funny."

On January 4, 2005, a Mallard Fillmore strip was published featuring a television executive whom bloggers accused of being a Jewish caricature that promoted the anti Semitic stereotype that "Hollywood is run by Jews." While the main "Mallard" page only shows a week's worth of cartoons at a time, this cartoon is available on Jewish World Review's web site. The strip's caricature of Jon Stewart, with a long, downwardly pointed nose, was criticized by Stewart's colleague satirist Stephen Colbert, who, during a December 14, 2006 show, joked that the caricature may have been "clip art from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Tinsley has since stated about Stewart that "honestly, I didn't even know he was Jewish." In August 2019, The San Diego Union Tribune announced it would be dropping Mallard Fillmore over antisemitism, concerning the August 12, 2019 edition of the strip featuring Ilhan Omar.

In 2004 Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman cited Mallard Fillmore as an example of misinformation. A strip showed a taxpayer attacking his TV set with a baseball bat and yelling: "I can't afford to send my kids to college, or even take 'em out of their substandard public school, because the federal, state and local governments take more than 50 percent of my income in taxes. And then the guy on the news asks with a straight face whether or not we can 'afford' tax cuts." Krugman stated, "Very few Americans pay as much as 50 percent of their income in taxes; on average, families near the middle of the income distribution pay only about half that percentage in federal, state and local taxes combined."

In March 2021, all Gannett owned newspapers which ran Mallard Fillmore dropped the strip over transphobia concerns relating to the February 19–20, 2021 strips which depicted trans women in women's sports in a negative light.

TitlePublication DateISBNMallard FillmoreOctober 1, 1995Mallard Fillmore. on the StumpMay 1, 1996