Today's Double-Toon: Twisted Logic & The REAL Black Hole Discovered By Dr. Wilbur Von Philbrick

With today's 'toon (plus a surprise bonus), Tom/Dan wrote about toon #1

I almost always start with the words. In this case, I was thinking about the ways in which Trump and his defenders will make contradictory statements, often in the same breath, and wrote down the first draft of the script. Initially it was just going to be a talking heads cartoon, dialogue between my two standard MAGA-hat guys, with the title in some sort of font that looked like pretzels. But that didn’t quite seem to push the idea far enough, and then it occurred to me that the people speaking needed to be, themselves, twisted up like contortionists. That meant I had to toss out the idea of using the MAGA guys and come up with a representative sampling of recognizable Trumpies, both in the administration and on Fox News (I know, effectively the same thing). The guy in the fourth panel is Mick Mulvaney — I went back and forth between him and Mnuchin, but decided neither of them are particularly recognizable, and Mulvaney was the one who actually said there was no way Trump will release his taxes — Mnuchin is still, as of this writing, pretending to study the legal aspects of the situation.

And I know, some of these cursed images may make you want to bleach your eyeballs. Sorry about that.

And... about toon #2, Tom/Dan wrote:

Since we got the first photograph of a black hole this week, I thought I’d re-up this cartoon from March, 2018. I still remember the writing process on this one, balancing what I understand of the actual science with the riff in the cartoon. The thing about time stopping in the event horizon, which provides the punchline of the cartoon (that we are all trapped in this endless horrific moment) is only partly true, as I understand it — to an outside observer, the person in the event horizon would appear to be suspended in time, but subjectively, that person would experience time to be passing normally — for a subjective second or two, until they were ripped apart by the gravitational forces of the black hole. That’s why I had Dr. Von Philbert note that no one knows what that experience would be like from the inside — my little way of signaling that I understand that the science and the satire point didn’t exactly align.

Until next week …


Dan/Tom

PS: Look at the Directory below and click on the [bracketed number] to go to that essay; click on "Back To Directory" to return to the top of the page.

Vannevar Bush hypertext — Bracketed numerics — Directory]
[1] Toon #1 — Pretzel Logic
[2] Toon #2 — March 2019 Chestnut: The Real Black Hole Discovery

If this is a (fair & balanced) double-barreled-look at the past week's events, so be it.

[1] — Back To Directory
[x TMW]
Pretzel Logic
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

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[2] — Back To Directory
[x TMW]
The Real Black Hole Discovery (March 2018)
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 © 2019 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

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