In the e-mail that brought today's TMW 'toon to this blogger's In Box, Tom/Dan wrote:
I used this riff on the Incredible Hulk throughout the 2016 campaign (see below), but the character was muscular and had gigantic fists because, you know he’s the Hulk! At a certain point it occurred to me that, in the unlikely event that Trump himself ever saw one of those cartoons, he’d actually be flattered by it. It was one of those realizations that worms its way into your head and won’t let go, and I dropped the character for awhile — but then rebooted him a few months ago in this much more flabby form, with appropriately tiny fists. The kernel of inspiration here was that I wanted to take it a step further — show him as this mostly impotent character sitting around his office, watching tv and tweeting, but not doing much more than that. I had too many panels written to open with my usual fake-comic-book-cover (which serves to establish the riff), which is why there’s a very tiny drawing of Trump in the title block — given that the first few panels just show him sitting in a chair, I needed to have that image up front, for the benefit of anyone who’s never seen one of the other cartoons, or alternately has never heard of the Incredible Hulk. (Also, I know, the Hulk is actually a sympathetic character, but sometimes you have to take a certain amount of artistic and satirical license.)
In the fifth panel, the final word balloon initially referenced Bill O'Reilly, but then Laura Ingraham started facing an advertiser boycott, and literally yesterday morning as I was finishing this up, it suddenly occurred to me that that would make it a timely joke, which everyone would assume had been my intention all along. Now you all know otherwise. What can I say, it's not always pretty to learn how sausage is made.
Until next week!
Dan
The day is swiftly approaching when the urrent occupant of the Oval Office eschews tweeting and goes out into the WH Rose Garden and howls at the moon like a demented dog. If it were not for the current VPOTUS, this moment would be worthy of a (fair & balanced) activation of the mechanism for removal of the POTUS in the 25th Amendment, so be it.
[x TMW]
The Unbelievable Trump
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 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)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
