Reflecting, the last week's events, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) sent a second e-mail containing a 'toon that reflected May 25-31, 2020 — day by miserable day — and Tom/Dan also wrote:
Okay, first off: please don’t share the cartoon I sent out on Thursday ("Spot the Mistakes")! I’m still hoping to publish it at some point in the next few weeks.
This was a very weird weekend to be offline and out of the world. I spent 36 hours in New Haven -- my first time out of my immediate NYC neighborhood since mid-March -- meeting with attorneys and getting the last of my stuff organized and out of the old house before my ex and I hand over the keys to the new owners on Monday. I had a lot of boxes to go through, a lot of decisions to make about what to keep and what to toss, not to mention a pinball machine and a car to get hauled away, all on a very tight deadline. There was a *lot* to take care of, which I had hoped to do over a few weekends in March and April, until the coronavirus changed everything. So I had basically no time to check in on the news, didn't even look at my phone until about one in the morning on Friday night/Saturday a.m. I slept on the floor of my empty house that night for maybe four hours, before I was up again early Saturday finishing everything up. I had a lot of memories in that house, and they were pretty good, until they were very bad. I didn’t have time to deal with the emotional impact of saying goodbye to my old home, of standing in my amazing old studio for the very last time, of walking down halls I’ll never walk down again, of completing the final major tasks of dismantling my previous life — there was just too much to do. That will probably come later.
Anyway, after nearly three months of lockdown and a fairly stagnant news cycle, I thought I could post a generic cartoon early and get that out of the way for the weekend, but as you are certainly aware, the news blew up on Friday, though I barely knew it at the time. I wrapped things up earlier in New Haven than expected — all those weeks, even months, of planning this thing out paid off, everyone showed up on time and did their part, and it all ran like clockwork — and I drove the rental car back to New York just in time to get caught in one of the protests on the West Side Highway. Bad timing for me, but waiting patiently in traffic felt like the one small contribution I could make in that moment. Eventually I made it to my block, and unloaded the car and then collapsed on my couch, exhausted, after getting maybe eight hours of sleep total over the past two nights, and caught up on the news a bit before I fell asleep. When I woke up Sunday morning, with a slightly clearer head, I knew I had to write *something* new about (gestures vaguely toward everything), on a laughably tight deadline. So, here it is. We’re in a pretty bad moment right now, and it’s probably only going to get worse. Wish I could be more optimistic.
Stay safe out there.
Dan/Tom
And that's the final word from our 'toonist. If this is (fair & balanced) hard truth in a time when truth is in short supply, so be it.
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x TMW]
Our Story So Far
By Tom Tomorrow (DanPerkins)
[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)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
