In yesterday's email, along with today's TMW 'toon, Tom/Dan wrote:
Hey All,
Another light-hearted, wacky look at our increasing descent into outright fascism. This one started as just a dialogue between a non-Hulked Trump and Chad Wolf, “Acting” Director of DHS, but as I worked on it, I felt like it read as a transcription of a conversation that could have actually happened. Such are the problems of satirists in the current era.
This job has always required a certain flexibility — in “normal” times, there could always be a late-breaking story at the end of the week that seemed important enough to throw out the week’s work and start over on Friday night. The cartoon first goes live on Monday mornings on Daily Kos, and then rolls out throughout the week with The Nib, The Nation, and various print clients. So my drop-dead deadline is Sunday evening, but I used to try not to work through the weekend. And in pre-pandemic times, my son would visit every other weekend, meaning I had to pretty much have things wrapped up by Friday night. These days, what are rules? what is time, even?
Mondays and Tuesdays are generally slow days — I start absorbing the news, via Twitter and the cable networks mostly, but also take care of the ancillary chores of running a one-man business — accounting, invoices, all the tedious-but-necessary stuff. By Wednesday, in an ideal world, I am writing the next brilliant cartoon, but more realistically, I am surrounded by a pile of notes with no idea what to do with them. Most weeks, Thursday is when the writing comes together, though this week it didn’t happen until Friday. If possible, I like to sleep it once I get something written, so I can read it with fresh eyes the next morning. Then I start working on the art, and with any luck I have everything finished up by Friday night or Saturday morning. Then I post the cartoon in the half-dozen or so different formats my various clients require, and then I have a day, day and a half off, to clean my apartment and buy groceries and take care of other chores. One of those chores has been sorting through old boxes of newspaper clips — printed copies of my cartoon from my alt-weekly days, and various articles and interviews with me. Over the course of a long career I have accumulated a *lot* of this stuff, and I’ve been slowly shipping it all off to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library in Columbus, which has done me the extraordinary favor of housing my “archives,” such as they are. I started this process about five years ago, after finishing up work on the big 25 year compilation, because I wasn’t sure what else I was going to do with them — leave them in my attic forever (when I imagined I would be living in that house longer than turned out to be the case). Right now I have a storage space in Connecticut with the “final mile” of boxes and things that I need to somehow sort out — I’m also a toy collector, and when I had a giant studio in the suburbs, oh boy did I accumulate things. One positive side-effect of the whole divorce thing has been winnowing this stuff down to a merely insane level of possessions, rather than an absolute batshit crazy level. It’s… a process.
I also try to fit in a neighborhood walk most days (or, in theory a bike ride, though I’m still working on making that part of my daily routine), and in the pre-pandemic world I tried to have a social life in the evening. But the struggle of being funny in an oppressively not-funny era is what takes up most of my time, if you were wondering how doing a single cartoon a week could possibly be a full time job. Staring at the computer in horror for hours on end doesn’t necessarily look like work, but it really is.
On a more frivolous note, I’ve also been playing Animal Crossingl lately. I admitted this to someone interviewing me the other day who replied jokingly, “what are you, a millennial?” If anyone else has been wasting time seriously let me know, maybe I’ll throw my island open for a Sparky’s List visit sometime. My house is as whimsical as you might expect.
Until next time!
Dan/Tom
And there you have it from a week where the most popular catchphrase is "Person, woman, man, camera, TV." This has become the mantra of The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King. This sorry excuse for an occupant of the Oval Office belongs in the Guinness World Records book as the only person identified (in this blog) as a One-Man Super-Spreader Of COVID-19. Thanks to the inaction by this fool — in November-December 2019 and all of 2020 thus far — COVID-19 is a world-wide pandemic. The rationale for his inaction was to protect his hopes of gaining a second term in the White House. The irony of this nonsense is that the last year of the fool's first term has been a monumental trainwreck and the likelihood of a one-term presidency IS NO HOAX. If this is a (fair & balanced) portrayal of our DISMAL, DREARY DAYS IN 2020, 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]
The Unbelievable Trump
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)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
