Today's 'toon was a surprise from Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins). Instead of last week's promise of an evergreen (rerun) 'toon, Tom/Dan explained:
Hey all,
I spent almost an entire week up in New Haven, to see my son for his birthday and attend some end-of-school activities, to meet with lawyers and divorce mediators, and to finish up packing a lifetime of memories in the old house, juggling all these things from early morning until late in the night each day.
So, that was kind of a full week.
I got back to New York late on Thursday, mentally and physically exhausted, with the intention of running a rerun cartoon this week — but once I had a few moments to dive back into the news, I felt compelled to crank out something new. My process is much slower than the usual cartoonist — I generally take a few days to research and write a cartoon, time to let it turn over in my head, time to sit with it and think about whether there’s a better way to get my point across, a more elegant turn of phrase, a sharper line of dialogue. But in this case it just felt more important to be contributing *something*, than to take a week off. There will be weeks like that at some point, no matter what’s happening in the news cycle — I’m taking my son on vacation for a couple weeks in August, and that’s just going to have to be time away from work, like any normal human being with a job is occasionally able to do. But I do want to keep them to an absolute minimum.
In other news: as you probably heard, my friend Rob Rogers was fired from his longtime staff job at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, for being too critical of the President. The new publisher of the paper is apparently quite the Trump fan. Here’s the thing: being critical of any sitting president is literally the job description for a political cartoonist. If you are simply cheerleading, well, there’s a word for that: propagandist. And Trump has a few of those out there. (Look up the works of Ben Garrison, if you want to see a prime example — his depictions of Trump as a muscular, well-coiffed conqueror are almost sexual in their adulation of an objectively grotesque man.) I took a lot of grief during the Clinton and Obama years for criticizing each man from the left, but I make no apologies for it, and the work holds up. (Cleverly inserted promotional link: you can read it for yourself and decide, in the comprehensive 25 YEARS OF TOMORROW compilation!)
The PPG runs TMW as a syndicated feature, and it hasn’t been dropped yet. I haven’t had a lot of extra mental bandwidth this week, and haven’t figured out yet if I should pull the strip in solidarity, or keep a voice of left-wing Trump opposition running in the paper as long as possible.
Below: a photoshop created for me by Rob Rogers 15 years ago. The tiny human in the (original, unretouched) photo now stands eye to eye with me, and I will always be grateful for his presence in my life. Happy fathers day to my fellow dads.
Until next time,
Dan (Tom)
In today's 'toon, even Wanda and Biff at Action McNews are reduced to babbling Fake News. If this is a (fair & balanced) view of the mad, mad world of June 2018, so be it.
[x TMW]
Breaking The News
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
