Welcome To The Coming Of The Dystopian United States Of America

In the e-mail that brought today's 'toon to the blogger's In Box, Tom/Dan wrote:

There were a few points I wanted to hit in this cartoon … the idea that Republican lawmakers have any business whatsoever legislating women’s health care, for one. The middle panels were inspired by the strange blowup on Twitter last week in which some men took the abortion debate waaaay off the rails by arguing that women don’t even *enjoy* sex, at least in their experience — which has to be one of the biggest self-owns in Twitter history, but also speaks to the ignorance of men regarding women in a larger way. And finally, the fact that so many supposedly pro-life Republicans have, themselves, facilitated abortions — GOP fundraiser Elliott Broidy, for instance, as well as the various examples in this McSweeney’s piece. I also struggled with the end, before I finally came up with this version, as I wanted to imply that these guys had mistresses but I hate the word "mistress" -- it's a fundamentally sexist construct, and more to the point it just sounded clunky and off key ("BUT WHAT IF MY *MISTRESS* BECOMES PREGNANT?") I think the final panels convey what I was trying to convey, hopefully more elegantly. At any rate, I somehow ended up spending more time than usual writing this one, as a result — this stew of commentary, rage and humor sometimes takes time to prepare. ...And in closing, a cartoon from 2012, which I honestly could have just re-run this week rather than writing something new. I’ve been writing these cartoons for close to thirty years now (strange, given how young I am, but I was a very precocious ten year old when I started the strip), and it’s always jarring how many old ones remain relevant, given that they often mention specific politicians or news events.

Oh, and thank you for subscribing to this list, as always. I’ve been taking a closer look at my finances lately (I had a complicated personal year, as some of you know, and a lot of things got backburnered), and given the slow, steady attrition of dying newspapers, this list is a genuinely significant chunk of my livelihood these days. In a very real sense, you are making it possible for me to continue to do this work full time, and I’m grateful for that, as I’m really not qualified to do much of anything else for a living at this point.

Until next week …,

Dan/Tom

And so, we pass the midpoint of the ironically deemed Merry Month of Maywith the rise of the authoritarians in the Red States.in an eerie precursor of Margaret Atwood's vision in The Handmaid's Tale (1985, 2017). If this is a (fair & balanced) premonition of dystopia, so be it.

[x TMW]
The Explainers
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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