Roll Over, Rembrandt, Van Gough, Kahlo, Picasso, & Warhol — Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) Has Inserterted His Self-Portrait In Today's "This Modern World" 'Toon

In his 'toon-bearing e-mail, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) also wrote:

Hey All,

First off, a quick reminder because there are a lot of new folks on the list: please do not share these cartoons before they go live on Monday mornings at Daily Kos! The point of this list is to give subscribers and early peek at the work, not to leak it out prematurely and undercut my diminishing list of paying clients. Thanks for keeping this in mind!

An early cartoon for you this week. Even though most of us will spend Memorial Day as we have spent every other day for the past ten weeks, sitting and home and doing our best to get through, it is still somehow a three day weekend, which meant an early deadline for your intrepid cartoonist, a fact which was brought to my attention, um, yesterday afternoon. So I stayed up last night finishing this one much more quickly than usual, in order to get it distributed in time for print clients (I still have a few!) with Friday deadlines. This one’s an odd hodgepodge — it started out as a more personal essay about the loss and disorientation we are all experiencing, and how similar this is for me to the loss and disorientation of waking up alone in New York City in those early months, two and a half years ago, after my marriage suddenly collapsed and everything seemingly stable in my life turned out to be transient and illusory. Maybe I’ll still write that one, in some format, but honestly, it was just too personal and I needed more time to sit with it and make sure I was hitting the right tone, and did I mention early deadlines? So that morphed into this. You'll note the reappearance of Quarantine Dan, who apparently never changes his food-stained shirt, which is haha definitely not a thing happening in reality. I'm not sure this really looks much like me -- it's unexpectedly challenging to caricature yourself. But, as I say, early deadline; I kinda had to just crank it out and go with it. (You will also note the small cameo by my new roommate, Felix.)

Next week’s cartoon may or may not be a rerun, which I want to mention in advance so no one worries that I’ve come down sick. My ex and I are *finally* selling the house we still co-own, which is extremely good news, but it requires a trip up to New Haven on my part to take care of some on-site details that basically no one else can handle. Don’t worry, I intend to take all precautions, and I’m renting a car rather than taking the train -- I have this thing mapped out in my head like a military operation to minimize exposure to the extent possible. It’s unavoidable, and will be the first time I’ve even been out of my immediate neighborhood since early March, let alone out of the city. It would almost be a vacation if it weren’t so entirely fraught. I’m hoping to just get it done and get out — there are a lot of ghosts in that empty house, "bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." But it’s been hanging over me for two and a half years, and in a little over a week it will finally be done, and I will be free of one more shackle binding me to a period of my life that I'm really ready to leave behind.

Stay well and stay safe, my friends.

Dan/Tom

It's a melancholy time for the 'toonist in terms of his internal and external lives. If this is the (fair & balanced) reality of the first half of 2020, so be it.

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[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi

[x TMW]
Ways To Pass The Pandemic
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 US, as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in the 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.]

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