Tom/Dan, back from travel to Italy, wrote the following in the e-mail that brought today's 'toon to the blogger's In Box:
This strip was (perhaps obviously) inspired by taking a couple weeks away from the immediate news cycle. I kept up with Twitter while I was traveling, to the extent I could, but when I got home I still felt like Rip Van Winkle, waking up to a strange new world. Originally I was going to set this up as the Man From the Distant Past of Two Weeks Ago, but I stretched it to a month so I could include more of the things that happened while I was away. Obviously the list of events is meant to be more impressionistic than comprehensive, but even at that, narrowing that list down enough to fit into the fourth and fifth panels while still retaining enough of it to make it seem overhwhelming was the biggest challenge of this cartoon. If I were a columnist, I could have just taken three or four paragraphs in the middle to list everything out, but we cartoonists don’t get such luxuries.
Readers with long memories may recall that this character and set-up originally appeared in a 2002 cartoon, but at that point he was the Man From Five Years in the Past. Things move more quickly these days....
Next weekend, I'm going to be in Iowa City, giving a presentation at the Witching Hour festival, on stage at the Englert theatre, which was the movie palace of my youth growing up there. I'm looking forward to it, but the next Sparky's [e-mail] list will probably be more perfunctory as a result.
Until then,
Dan (aka Tom)
So, there you have it — explication of today's 'toon by Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) hisself. If this is (fair & balanced) virtual phantasmagoria, so be it.
[x TMW]
Man From The Past
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
