Today, A Colloquy Between Sparky The Wonder Penguin & MAGA Guy During This Pandemic Crisis

In the e-mail bearing today's TMW 'toon, the 'toonist (Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins) wrote:

Greetings, comrades in isolation!

Without my weekly deadline, I don’t think I’d have any idea what day it is anymore. I’m sending out another cartoon, so apparently another week has gone by, whatever a”week” is. Meanwhile there are idiots protesting social lockdown, as if they think the virus is just another front in the war of Trump cultists vs. everyone else. They are a noisy minority getting too much attention, but when the president of the United States is egging them on, you can’t just ignore them. I think the media is correct to cover their protests, they just need to be put in context — a thought that inspired me to rewrite the fifth panel of this very cartoon at the last minute (it was originally a comment about how gathering in tightly packed crowds to protest the virus was a brain genius move, but I think that’s implied in the final panel anyway).

You will also note that I reformatted my standard panel shapes for this cartoon. It seemed jarring to have Sparky and the MAGA guy standing right next to each other, the way I would usually portray two talking heads in a dialogue-driven cartoon like this, so I went with these horizontal panels emphasizing the space between the two characters. And, of course, gave Sparky a face mask, though I have no idea where he found one fitted to his beak.

I do find myself wondering what I’ll do when the current state of emergency lessens. My apartment, already too expensive, is going to be difficult to justify as the corona-related hits to my income continue to pile up. And … what’s it going to be like, to live in the city, when all the reasons for living here -- restaurants, bars, shows, museums -- are either momentarily or permanently gone, or at best severely restricted? Things are not going to be “normal” here for a long time. If everyone’s time is mostly spent in a semi-permanent state of quarantine — and I think this is highly likely until a vaccine or an effective treatment are widely available — I’m just not sure what the point of being here is, rather than somewhere where my money will stretch a lot further. I could move back to the New Haven area — my kid is still there, which is a very strong argument in favor of this, but it’s also a place I never liked much to begin with, and now it’s saturated with bad memories and people I’d rather avoid. So that’s not ideal. But I do need to stay within some proximate distance of my son for at least another year — I’m not going to move anywhere that requires plane travel for us to see each other, which limits my options. Maybe upstate? I have friends who live up in the Hudson Valley, and I’ve been texting with them and hearing stories about how idyllic and relatively cheap life can be there. It’s not what I wanted my life to look like — despite the personal difficulties of the past couple of years, I liked my life in New York City quite a lot, before the virus changed everything. But now it’s starting to feel like the last two years may have been a strange interlude, bookended by a divorce on one side and a global pandemic on the other. But, you know, it was fun while it lasted.

Until next “week” …

Dan/Tom

IF this is (fair & balanced) musing about the worst hard time we have known since those who went before us (now mostly gone) lived through the Great Depression and WWII, so be it.

[x TMW]
Liberty And Death!
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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