History ComicStrip / MallardFillmore

* MissingMom: Rush's mom. All we know is that she's a feminist who disapproved that her ex-husband named their son after Rush Limbaugh.

* IntrepidReporter: Technically Mallard, though we don't actually see him doing anything suggesting he researches or sniffs out stories - just that he reports on them.

* {{Parody}}: SomethingAwful started a trend of rewriting every strip in YeOldeButcheredeEnglish to hammer home how incredibly ass backwards and regressive Tinsleys views are. They call it [[http://fowlherald.tumblr.com/ Ye Fowl Herald]].

* NeverLiveItDown: After Bruce Tinsley's DUI arrest in 2006, many people started nicknaming "Mallard" as "Drunk Duck" or worse. It's still going on today, nearly a decade later.

Much like compatriots ''ComicStrip/{{Prickly City}}'' and ''Doonesbury'', the strip is ostensibly a slice of life story with a political bent. When the strip began, Mallard was hired to work at a television news station and thus his co-workers (all liberals, naturally) served as targets for the strip's conservative humor. Over time, this has largely been dropped and most of the supporting cast only appear very rarely. Today the strip just generally portrays Mallard as a mouthpiece for Tinsley's personal views, blurring the line between a straight newspaper comic strip and a series of political cartoons that all happen to feature the same character.

* Parody: SomethingAwful started a trend of rewriting every strip in YeOldeEnglish to hammer home how incredibly ass backwards and regressive Tinsleys views are. They call it [[http://fowlherald.tumblr.com/ Ye Fowl Herald]].

Much like compatriots ''Prickly City'' and ''Doonesbury'', the strip is ostensibly a slice of life story with a political bent. When the strip began, Mallard was hired to work at a television news station and thus his co-workers (all liberals, naturally) served as targets for the strip's conservative humor. Over time, this has largely been dropped and most of the supporting cast only appear very rarely. Today the strip just generally portrays Mallard as a mouthpiece for Tinsley's personal views, blurring the line between a straight newspaper comic strip and a series of political cartoons that all happen to feature the same character.

* Parody: SomethingAwful started a trend of rewriting every strip in YeOldeEnglish to hammer home how incredibly ass backwards and regressive Tinsleys views are. THey call it [[http://fowlherald.tumblr.com/ Ye Fowl Herald]].

!!Tropes:

!!Tropes:

* WithUsOrAgainstUs: Mallard once pre-empted a professor from invoking GodwinsLaw over then-President GeorgeWBush's use of the phrase by remarking that the professor's generation made [[NotSoDifferent "You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem."]] a famous rallying cry.

'''This strip provides examples of:'''

* PunnyName: The title character is an obvious play on MillardFillmore.

->''"I think papers carry this strip for 'balance', i.e., to shut up the ''{{Doonesbury}}'' critics so they can keep it on the comics page."''

* {{Expy}}: More than a few critics have noted Mallard's incredible similarity to [[BloomCounty Opus the Penguin]]. This is less obvious on the rare days that Mallard's head is colored -- his head is canonically green (being a mallard), but on weekdays, his head is jet black, making the resemblance uncanny.

* WomenAreWiser: Mallard's ([[InterspeciesRomance human!]]) wife/girlfriend is considerably more reasonable than he is.
* WorthyOpponent: Chantelle, a newscaster who works with Mallard. She's the token non-straw-liberal and appears in the strip on the rare occasions Tinsley agrees with the liberal argument or wants to call conservatives to task over something.

* WomenAreWiser: Mallard's ([[InterspeciesRomance human!]]) wife/girlfriend is considerably more reasonable than he is .

->''"I think papers carry this strip for "balance", i.e., to shut up the ''{{Doonesbury}}'' critics so they can keep it on the comics page."''

-->'''[[http://joshreads.com/?p=932 The Comics Curmudgeon]]'''

-->''"I think papers carry this strip for "balance", i.e., to shut up the ''{{Doonesbury}}'' critics so they can keep it on the comics page."''

''MallardFillmore'', by Bruce Tinsley, is about an anthropomorphic duck journalist and the struggles he finds in dealing with a liberal world. It started out as a non-political strip for ''The Daily Progress'', which had asked Tinsley to create a mascot strip for their entertainment page. After several rejections, the eponymous duck won out and the strip was launched. After Tinsley expressed his conservative political views, he found himself out of a job. He successfully sold the strip to ''The Washington Times'' in 1992 and eventually got it syndicated nationally by King Features Syndicate.

** Oh come on, doesn't he look like he shares 99.9% of his DNA with Daffy Duck?

[[TheDailyShow http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/mallard.jpg]]
[[caption-width:242:How critics see this comic.]]

* DownToEarth: Mallard's ([[InterspeciesRomance human!]]) wife/girlfriend is considerably more reasonable than he is .

* WallOfText: [[http://www.chron.com/apps/comics/showComick.mpl?date=20080809&name=Mallard_Fillmore Many]] [[http://www.chron.com/apps/comics/showComick.mpl?date=20080510&name=Mallard_Fillmore strips]] are a pile of word balloons crowding out, at best, a [[http://www.chron.com/apps/comics/showComick.mpl?date=20070323&name=Mallard_Fillmore character's head]].