Along with today's 'toon, Tom/Dan wrote:
Hey all,
This is probably the last timely cartoon of the decade for me, due to holiday publishing schedules. There will be one more new one that you haven’t read, but it’s an evergreen/backup cartoon, and probably one rerun. There’s always this odd moment in mid-December when suddenly I realize that I’m done for the year, slightly sooner than most people because of the odd nature of my weekly deadline cycle. I have jury duty next week, which I deliberately postponed from last summer, knowing that this is the best time of the year for me to be able to afford to take a few days off. (Hopefully no more than that — I’m all for doing one’s civic duty, but if I were to get stuck on a months-long trial, it would literally destroy my career. We’ll see how that goes!)
End of a decade. Ten years ago I had a wife, a six year old son, a dog, a small house with a backyard. I definitely did not anticipate ending the decade as a single man living in a Manhattan apartment. I guess my major career accomplishment of the decade was publishing the two-volume TMW retrospective (which you can still buy!) — that project took up a couple years of my life, from start to finish. And of course there was the late personal unpleasantness when my marriage abruptly careened into a ditch, like the train at the beginning of "The Fugitive." (And of course it was less abrupt than it seemed, I just didn’t see that the railroad tracks had grown so degraded over the years.) I’ve spent two years trying to climb out of that ditch — sometimes frenetically, sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes just because all you can do is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I have noticed lately that there’s been a shift in my approach — I’ve gone from deliberately, almost performatively “creating a new life” to just … living my life. Trying to move forward, trying not to let the weight of past mistakes drag me under. It’s still a work in progress.
It's probably getting late for this, but a quick reminder that there are many — well, a few — fine products available in the store, for the TMW fan in your life.
Best holiday wishes to all of you,
Dan/Tom
And that marks the holiday message from our 'toonist. This blog salutes his perseverance in the wake of a very bad year. If this is the (fair & balanced) dedication to his arrtistic craft, so be it.
[x TMW]
Elementary
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)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2019 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
