Tom/Dan wrote in the e-mail that brought today's 'toon to the In Box:
I finished this one up on Friday night, right before the Arpaio pardon was announced. The appalling Friday news dump is now just part of our national weekly routine.
The current owners of the Village Voice announced this week that they’re ending the print edition, but claim the paper will still live on as a website and a “brand,” which I think is corporate-speak for “it won’t live on.” A month or two ago, I was asked to sign an open letter in support of the Voice's union (which I did), and I wonder if that battle had something to do with this decision. The Voice was really the first altweekly, and as a young cartoonist it was the brass ring, the pinnacle that you hoped for but never really believed you’d get. Except that I did, starting in about 1997 or so, and for ten years (give or take, my memory’s a bit fuzzy on the exact dates) I was a cartoonist for the Village Voice. I even did several covers for them! But then the New Times cowboys bought it and tried to turn it into a cookie cutter version of all the other papers in their chain, and things went downhill from there. That same crew had a habit of buying papers and starting newspaper wars in various cities, as a result of which they ultimately killed both altweeklies in San Francisco (their own and the paper they went to war with) *and* both altweeklies in Cleveland, and probably more than I’m not even aware of. When the history of this industry is written, those guys will bear every bit as much responsibility for its demise as the shift to digital/online. It’s a genuine shame, because these papers filled a very specific niche; at their best, they were the local watchdogs, taking on fights that the more cautious local dailies wanted nothing to do with. I don’t mean to write the obituary for the entire industry prematurely — I still run in a lot of the remaining papers — but in the last few years we’ve lost the Voice, as well as papers in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco, that I know about. None of this bodes well.
Until next time,
Dan (aka Tom)
And so, this blogger must look forward to the nonsense of a "presidential visit" to flood-ravaged Houston on Tuesday as the skies are clearing. This blogger would gladly trade that visit on the ground for a replay of The Dubster flying over New Orleans after the Katrina disaster; The Dubster never made it to New Orleans on the ground. The Traitor-in-Chief probably explored the possibility of holding a "rally" in Houston as the signature event of his visit. If this is (fair & balanced) rejection of excuses and dissembling, so be it.
[x TMW]
Trump Two-Step
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..
Copyright © 2017 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
