Roll Over, Sisyphus — The Stupid Rock Just Rolls Backward For Us To Spend The Next Day... Pushing It Again

Along with today's 'toon, Tom/Dan wrote:

Hey all,

This is the first time I’ve used the Invisible Hand character in awhile. I was trying to write something about how Trump seemed more concerned with the sudden tumult in the stock market than with, you know, the imminent pandemic creating that tumult, when my 16 year old texted me that the assignment in his textbook was to analyze … one of my old cartoons. This one:

That was a pretty rewarding moment as a parent, and also inspired me to use the character this week. The running joke in the Invisible Hand cartoons is, of course, that he’s actually not invisible at all — it’s my little comment on the idea that the market has some secret wisdom driving it, rather than human greed and/or panic. So the first panel is almost always some somebody pointing out that they can see him, and the Hand responding with exasperation, “IT’S A METAPHOR!” I was trying to figure out what that should be in the context of a conversation with Trump, and realized that Trump simply wouldn’t understand or be interested in the question.

It is an extremely unsettling moment, but … this is what I do. Stay tuned for more wacky cartoons about the global pandemic, the coming apocalypse, etc. It will be a laff-riot!

A small process note on this one, of interest to maybe ten or fifteen of you: note how Trump and the Hand switch positions in the fourth and fifth panels. This was structurally necessary due to the way the word balloons had to be placed in the sixth panel. I could have started them out in this position, but it would have made the placement of the word balloons in the first half of the cartoon awkward, and caused them to take up too much space.

'Till next time,
Dan/Tom

With that, the daily $hitshow that ihovers over all of us these daysm goes on and on and on. If this is a (fair & balanced) version of absurdism, so be it.

[x TMW]
Some Handy Advice
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.]

Copyright © 2020 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

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