Roll Over, Ray Bradbury — Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) Creates His Own Version Of "The Butterfly Effect"

With today's 'toon, the e-mail contained the following message from the 'toonist:

Hey All,

So, this is just a sort of goofy evergreen cartoon that I wrote New Years week. That week is always awkward, deadline-wise, as the cartoons I cranked out in advance for holiday publication schedules have run and I have to get back to work, but it’s still *sort of* a holiday week — and also there’s usually not much happening, news-wise. Ha ha, well, as it turned out, Trump assassinated Soleimani that week and almost got us into a shooting war, and this cartoon got backburnered. Which ended up working out for me — I desperately needed a backup this week, having drastically overscheduled myself with out-of-town company, participation in a group cartoonist reading at a bookstore in Brooklyn, and a trip to DC to help judge a cartoon contest. Life/work balance is tricky! I always manage to hit my deadlines, but sometimes I feel like I’m balancing dishes on poles while riding a unicycle over a tightrope.

Small background note on this one: the fifth panel initially had the time traveler musing, “…none of which happened in MY timeline, in which Donald Trump was a highly respected man of great moral character.” But because I overthink things (or, more charitably, want to maintain some semblence of internal consistency), I kept thinking — but if their timeline’s version of Trump was highly respected, doesn’t that sort of undercut the conceit of going back in time to erase his presidency? I mean, it makes sense to *me* — I’ve established, over and over again, that Dr Von Philbert is a deus ex machina, setting ridiculous scenarios in motion purely “for SCIENCE!”, without any regard whatsoever for the consequences or political implications of his actions. So maybe he just wanted to … see what would happen! But I still decided to take the line out, because it just seemed like it threw the cartoon off, somehow. (That said, I wouldn’t think about this one too deeply — it’s a goofy cartoon, not a science fiction novel. I’m aware that it makes no sense, that’s why I ended it the way I did!)

Oh also, I suppose I should start mentioning that I have a new book coming out in June, featuring almost every cartoon I’ve done since the start of the Trump era. “Almost” because I had to trim out maybe three or four cartoons due to the page count — books are printed in signatures of 16 pages, and you’re locked in to a certain page count or you have to add an extra signature, and probably wisely my publisher didn’t want to kick up the price point in order to include that handful of cartoons. So, like a merciless predator, I culled out the weakest few. I’ve crammed in as many as I could, foregoing the usual page-wasting title page, about-the-author page, and so on. Trust me, all your favorites will still be in this one. You can pre-order the book on Amazon, which can help make a difference with the amount of effort the publisher is willing to put into promoting the thing.

That’s it for this week — I’m posting this early, so I still have both the bookstore talk and the DC trip in my immediate future, though they are in my past as you are reading these words. It’s like time travel, appropriately enough.

Until next week!

Dan

There you have a version of the impossible dream when a time traveler accidentally altered the future with a transormed New York real estate developer. If this is a (fair & balanced) pleasant fantasy in 2020, so be it.

[x TMW]
It's About Time
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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