In a companion e-mail message with today's (04/24/2017) 'toon, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) wrote:
This cartoon was initially inspired by Trump’s “Obama tapped my wires” tweets, and the subsequent GOP response. It was supposed to run a couple weeks ago, but I ended up bumping it for my last-minute cartoon on the Syria missile strike. Bannon had just been kicked off the NSC at that point; I’m slightly surprised that he remains in the White House at all, but it does allow me to still use the final panel with only slight editing. Of course, I’m traveling this weekend, so if it turns out that he finally gets the boot before you see this cartoon, bear with me — it’s really not easy staying ahead of the news these days.
One note about writing this cartoon: I wanted the inspiration for the tweet to come from Trump watching television, because in reality a lot of his tweeting is in response to what he sees on Fox News. I wanted him to be watching a show that was both dumb and culturally ubiquitious — the latter being why I had to go so far back in time. I realized when brainstorming this one that I don't really watch much current tv anymore, apart from a handful of shows like "The Americans," and as I started asking around, neither does anyone I know. I was concerned that "Gilligan's Island" might be too archaic a reference, but I checked with my 13-year-old, who assured me that *everyone* knows what Gilligan's Island is. So that's what I went with!...
Until next time,
Dan (aka Tom)
Each panel of today's 'toon portrays the array of Idiocratic Stupids babbling their canned nonsense. From Il Douche, to Spicy, on to House Speaker Cheesehead in tandem with Senate Majority Leader Mr. Turtle, with pair of interchangeable Faux News talking heads, and concluding with the Boy Who Would Be King (Kushner) with Steve Alt-Right and VP Ha'Pence. Idiocracy, indeed. If this is a (fair & balanced) portrayal of Stupidity (today's version of the GOP — Grand Old Party), so be it.
[x TMW]
How Government Works Now
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]
Copyright © 2017 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
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