The Candidate Seeking Re-Election Is On The Ropes, But One Of Those Ropes Should Be Around His Miserable Neck

Along with the 'toon in yesterday's e-mail, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) also wrote:

Another week in America, as I write and rewrite cartoons trying to keep up with the news. That’s not ideal, but you know what else isn’t ideal? Our current slide into literal fascism. Federal agents in camo, with no identifying markings, are grabbing protesters off the street in Portland and hauling them away in unmarked vans. This is, to put it mildly, cause for concern, especially as acting director of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli says that not only does he not intend to back down, he intends to use the strategy in other American cities. (We have a lot of “acting” directors in power these days, it allows our would-be tinhorn despot to install loyalists without the annoying bother of Congressional oversight.)

You probably saw the Goya Beans thing in the news or on social media — the CEO of that company praised Trump, and there was an immediate backlash, and the redhats all suddenly professed their love for Goya, and suddenly beans were in the middle of the latest culture war skirmish. Ivanka Trump posted a photo of herself holding a can of beans looking every bit like a model in one of the old 1950s era magazine advertisements that originally inspired the look and feel of my strip. And then Trump himself posed with a bunch of Goya products lined up on the Resolute desk. No one told me that the descent into fascism was going to be so entirely stupid.

I’m experimenting with how I draw Trump’s hair in this one — the hair itself has morphed over the years and it was time to update my portrayal of it. I mean, with luck, I’ve only got six more months of this guy as the lead character in my strip. Of course if he manages to hang onto power somehow, we’ll probably get to the stage in a dictatorship in which criticism of the leader is no longer allowed (contemporary Russia hit that point a long time ago, satirical portrayals of Putin are effectively banned). So it’s plausible that I’ve got six months to a year of drawing this guy remaining no matter what.

I rewrote the fourth panel at the last minute to try to make it a more direct reference to Portland. Here’s what the original panel looked like (another subscriber bonus!). I had to lose the small visual joke of the long tie hanging over the podium in order to add a little extra text. Everything's a trade off.

That's all I got for this week, as I drag myself over the finish line once again.

Until next time,

Dan/Tom

And so, we enter another week in the loony-bin known as the United States of America, If this is a (fair & balanced) farce that passes for everyday life, so be it.

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[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi

[x TMW]
Re-Election Strategy
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkiins)

[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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