By Ted Rall & Pablo Callejo (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-272-4 (Album HB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-273-1
How many times have you heard it? “Print is deadâ€, “there’s no money in news†and other crass judgements solving a thorny problem by simply dismissing and diminishing it.
Thankfully folk like Ted Rall don’t always accept what they’re told in the way they’re meant to and have the ability to counterpunch with counterpoints…
Frederick Theodore Rall III was born in 1963, so he’s grown up with the gradual defanging and commercial contamination of journalism in an era of increased distrust of democracy and unchecked political malfeasance. A figure of constant controversy, he works widely as an editorial cartoonist, columnist and author of such books as Waking Up in America, The Year of Loving Dangerously, Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America, To Afghanistan and Back and many more.
Equally adept with outrageous but well-reasoned fantasy as compelling non-fiction, Rall has reunited with Pablo Callejo (Bluesman, The Castaways, The Year of Loving Dangerously) for a frighteningly convincing extrapolation of the way things are, that is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in the last decade.
Mark Scribner is a highly experienced, world-weary investigative journalist who has also grown old in the above-cited decades. A veteran observer of conflicts, police actions, interventions and wars, with contacts from every stratum of all those zones and scenes and bars. He literally knows everyone in the global conflict game while viewing the advance of citizen reportage and click-bait editorialising with increasing despair.
However, when a crisis of conscience finally comes in a crisis barely making headlines anywhere, Scribner – always somehow in the right place at the right time – makes a bold new decision and picks a path far less, if indeed ever, travelled…
However, although his new lifepath carries incredible rewards as well as danger, Scribner is still tied to his old self and the values that elevate or destroy all humans alike, and his successes carry seeds of awful destruction…
Gripping, smart and scarily plausible, this potent dose of realpolitik is a supremely engaging yarn no news junkie or comics addict can afford to miss. Maybe you can’t handle the truth, but you should definitely handle this…
© 2021 Ted Rall & Pablo G. Callejo. © 2021 NBM for the English translation.
The Stringer is scheduled for physical release in the UK on May 25th 2021, with digital editions available now. For more information and other great reads please see http://www.nbmpub.com/