Monday, September 16, 2019

Want To Guess Who Has A Featured Role In Today's This Modern World 'Toon About Our Seemingly Perpetual "Stupidverse"? Hint: His Name Starts With "T" & Rhymes With "Chump"

In the e-mail bearing today's TMW 'toon, Tom/Dan also wrote:

Ah, hello everyone! It was indeed yet another week in the stupidverse. Sometimes I’ll be on a date making getting-to-know-you chitchat and my date will say, “but you must have so much material!” At which point I just give them a despairing look and melt into dust as if Thanos has just snapped his glove. Okay not exactly, but still. I’ve said this before, but every… single… week… is like asking for a glass of water in a restaurant and instead the waiter pulls out a firehose and blasts you in the face. I used to feel like my cartoons were a reasonably comprehensive review of current events — you can read through a lot of my old books and get a sense of what was going on at that moment in time, what people were talking about. These days, I feel like I’m barely scratching the surface at best.

Couple of notes on this one: the first panel was initially going to be a riff on the old “weapons-related-program-activity” line from the Gulf War days, but the word “program” sort of stuck out and didn’t seem to make sense, even if you were old enough to remember that little piece of ancient history. As it is, I think it stands on its own, but still gestures toward the source for those with long memories.

In the second panel, you’ll notice that I’ve given Sparky [the Wonder Penguin] a press pass, just because I couldn’t quite figure out what he would be doing in the room otherwise. Yes, I think about things like this.

Fourth panel was inspired by a line in the New York Times, which did in fact say that Trump’s claim to have been down in the rubble with a team of men on 9/11 was “exaggerated.”

The final panel was an attempt to capture how I feel most weeks. It’s my job to keep all this stuff straight in my head, and I feel like my brain has turned to goo. I’m constantly thinking, wait, wasn’t there a quote, a line, an incident that’s relevant here, and I can’t quite remember what it was, because it happened in the distant past, three or four days before.

Until next time…,

Dan/Tom

Today's 'toon provides the most apt description of US life in Seotember 2019: we are living in a Stupidverse with no limit on Stupid. The perpetual Reality TV Show and it's "star" Must Be Canceled. The method of cancellation is found in the 25th Amendment or Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution of the United States. Mao tse-Tung famously said, "A journey of great distance begins with the first step." The Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives must take that first step before all is lost. If this is a (fair & balanced) case that the US is in mortal danger, so be it.

]x TMW]
Trapped 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 © 2019 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)



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