The Most Important Question Of Our Time: How & Why Have We Come To This End?

Along with the e-mail of today's 'toon, Dan/Tom wrote:

Hey all,

This is the third time I’ve returned to this Trump-as-detective theme, and I feel like I’m still figuring out the details as I go along. With this one, I’m trying out two new things: first, it occurred to me that the Trump narration should basically read as if he were tweeting it, weird capitalization and all. Second, the thing that bothered me about my other attempts was that there was no real visual component to it — I just had Trump, in the Oval Office, spouting all this nonsense. Which, to be fair, is a reasonably accurate representation of reality. But — there are basically two cartoon tropes to represent “detective” — the Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade look, with an overcoat and a fedora and maybe a cigarette (and I’ve used that one a lot, with my Thomas Friedman, Private Eye cartoons that I used to do more regularly, back when I even had the bandwidth to care what Thomas Friedman was up to), and of course, the Sherlock Holmes look. I had been reluctant to go with either, because either one required covering up Trump’s signature hair, either with a fedora or a deerstalker cap, but I decided it would be fun to give the latter a shot anyway. Which allowed for some small touches that I’m particularly pleased with — Trump examining his phone with a Sherlockian magnifying glass, for instance. And the pipe — in the pre-Benedict Cumberbatch era, the pipe was one of the signature motifs used to represent Holmes. Having Trump smoke didn’t quite make sense, visually or conceptually — until I realized the pipe could have soap bubbles coming out of it. Anyway, particularly given that I had to get this one out around a holiday, I’m happy enough with the final product. I know I’ve said this a few times, but next week really is likely to be a rerun — the court date to finalize my divorce, which was supposed to have happened a few weeks ago, should be next week, and to be honest, I may just cut myself some slack on the week in which my 23 year relationship with my former spouse officially, legally comes to an end. And while we’re looking ahead, a small reminder: I don’t do Year in Review cartoons over the Christmas break anymore. Trump broke that format. There’s too much craziness in a single week, summarizing a year of Trump in two sixteen-panel cartoons seems too Herculean a task.

Until next time…

Dan/Tom

Of course, this blogger is perplexed by the present-day fulfillment of H. L. Mencken's near-century-old prophecy:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.”
— H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

And the great unsolved mystery of the second decade of the 21^st century is how in pluperfect hell could enough voters be so stupid or deranged that they would elect the worst occupant of the Oval Office in the entire history of the United States of America? If this is the (fair & balanced) question of our age, so be it.

[x TMW]
The Great Detective
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

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 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 © 2018 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)




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