Along with today's 'toon, Tom/Dan wrote:
Greetings from my undisclosed location in the Catskills, where I'm hanging out with a friend and taking a working vacation. At home, I draw these cartoons on a large Cintiq drawing monitor -- I believe it's something like 24 inches diagonally, and must weigh about 50 pounds, it's definitely not something you throw in your rucksack and head out on the road with. However I have a mobile setup with a much smaller drawing tablet that plugs into my laptop, which I haven't used in a couple of years, but glad to see that I can still work on the road. I still haven't quite gotten my head around the fact that I am essentially free to do whatever I want to do (I mean, you know, within reason) these days -- I could literally pack this setup up and go sleep on friends' couches in California or Italy or whatever, and still get my work done. Going to try to keep that in the back of my mind for the coming year. A lot of what I've been through this year has been pretty awful, but I'm trying to be cognizant of the possibilities of this new life as well. Hence my current week, at aforementioned undisclosed location in the Catskills!
And in about a week and a half, I'm taking my 15 year old son on vacation, for our first solo trip of the new post-divorce reality. I won't be doing any work on that trip — that's going to be a genuine vacation, focused entirely on my kid. Haven't quite figured out what cartoons I'm going to send out for at least that week, and possibly the one after, depending on how jet lagged I am on return — either a rerun, or an old backup, or if I'm very lucky, something new. But as I wrote last week, getting ahead of the news cycle in the Trump era is an almost unmanageable task.
Aaand in early September, will be packing up the mobile setup and heading to Boston for a few days, to work during the day and see a couple of Pearl Jam shows and hang out with the band at Fenway Park at night. Haven't confirmed this, but there's some talk of me reprising my role as Guy in a Donald Trump Mask onstage at some point.
Welcome to all the new members on the list — tell your friends to join too! I wrote about this on Twitter a little bit the other day, but this divorce means that I've lost the security I was entirely counting on, moving forward in this apocalyptic media landscape — the security of a partner with tenure, effectively a guaranteed job for life. Regrettably that safety net collapsed beneath me without warning, and with the entire media world imploding before our eyes, things like Sparky's List are literally going to be what keeps this cartoon alive and sustainable over the next few years... so I thank you all for your support.
Until next time,
Dan (aka Tom)
And, with that, Tom/Dan gives us the Stupidverse that has become our reality. If this is a (fair & balanced) description of the unreality that is 2018, so be it.
[x TMW]
Life In The Stupidverse
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
