Today's "This Modern World" 'toon features the two blow-dried news presenters of Action McNews, a newscast in which Tomorrow suggests that most TV news is little more than PR spin. A Biff and Wanda strip almost always ends with a cut to a commercial break ("Now, these messages!"). And along with this parody of TV news, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) wrote the following message in the email:
This has been a recurrent theme, but it’s personally inescapable: the deluge of news stories, any one of which would have toppled any other administration, that we must wade through every single week. And I didn’t even get everything in here! Trump has to pay off Stormy Daniels’ lawyers fees — that would have ended any other presidency! Trump claiming that the deep-state FDA is slow-walking a corona vaccine because they haven’t developed one in less time than any other vaccine has been developed in human history. I have to write these things down as I come across them or else they evaporate from my increasingly overloaded brain.
The “AMN” bug in the corner is an easter egg for anyone who remembers that my generic correspondents work for the Action McNews Network. I wanted to do something fun with the background of my socially distanced anchors, and initially considered bookshelves, but it’s only cable news guests who do hits in front of their artfully arranged shelves, the anchors themselves always sit in front of greenscreen backdrops. So, just for fun, I used different locations in the same city, but at different times of day, as if somebody in the control room wasn’t paying attention to what they were doing.
A friend on Twitter noted last week that it was the third anniversary of the day our idiot president stared into a solar eclipse, and it made me think about where I was that day. I watched the eclipse (with proper eye protection!) from the porch outside my giant suburban studio in August 2017, not even remotely suspecting that I had less than ninety days to go in that life. Shit was about to get real weird, real fast.
By the beginning of January 2018, I was living alone in an apartment in New York City, trying to figure out where the mack truck that just crashed through my life had even come from. That entire first year on my own is all kind of a blur to me now — especially with the enforced solitude of the pandemic giving me a moment to pause and reflect on the strange journey from there to here.
Anyway, it’s all been on my mind again lately, as I realize that the third anniversary of one of the more unpleasant days of my life is looming ahead in the near distance. But to borrow a phrase from my Twitter friend, the great poet Maggie Smith, you keep moving. There will come a moment when things are better (or, haha, at least differently bad). There's a line from a Rilke poem that a friend shared with me that first confusing year, that remains taped to my drawing monitor to this day: "Then I know that there is room in me/for a second huge and timeless life." I try to hang onto that thought, but it's not always easy these days.
Be safe and be well.
Dan/Tom
Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins is suffering from the malaise that afflicts all of us. If this is (fair & balanced) muted grief for our lot in life, 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]
Breaking The News
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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