Today, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) Has Given Us A Riddle, Wrapped In A Mystery, Inside An Enigma — Both In A Cartoon While, At The Same Time, We Must Endure Another Real World Distraction In This Age Of Chaos

In the email bearing today's 'toon, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) also wrote:

Hey all,

This one is hot off the drawing board, literally finished moments ago. In long-ago times, I used to have a fairly standard Monday-through-Friday working routine. I’d generally finish the week’s cartoon by Thursday evening or Friday morning, and have a free weekend like a normal person, which was important when I was married and living with my then-young son. These days, it feels pointless to even really try to start writing before Thursday, and even at that, more often than not some crazy thing breaks on a Friday. Anyway, news of Trump coming down with the COVID meant scrapping my notes for a cartoon about what precautions they could take against Trump for the next presidential debate and starting from scratch. A running theme through a lot of my work lately seems to be, basically, the sheer overwhelming chaos of this moment. In this case, it is explained by the fact that we are all living in a computer simulation run by a somewhat sadistic Dr. Von Philbert on a higher level of reality.

I’ve used this riff a couple times before. The word “simulacron” is a shout-out to an old science fiction novel by Daniel F. Galouye, called Simulacron 3 (1964, 2019). It pre-dated the "Matrix" by several decades but had the same basic idea — the society in which the protagonist lives is a computer simulation (in that case, a world built for advertisers to test-market slogans, a truly devious idea). In the novel, the protagonist is working on his own simulacron when he discovers he is living in one himself, so there are three levels of reality in the story. I’ve made reference to that the previous two times I’ve done variations on this theme — in those cartoons, Dr. Von Philbert is running these experiments on a crazy world in which Trump is president, while one level above, a more benign Dr. Von Philbert is running experiments on a world in which Trump is *not* president. I decided not to repeat myself with that bit, though, it didn’t really fit into the concept for this one.

It’s a tricky thing, to write about an unfolding news story about which we have little reliable information, involving a president with a potentially fatal disease. I went high concept for this week — maybe next week we’ll have more actual information and I can dig into the details. Or maybe the zombie apocalypse will be unleashed and I’ll be writing about that.

Oh, and another reminder that my new book is now shipping!

Be safe and be well,

Dan/Tom

P.S. [In a subsequent email]

Follow up to the first email (there's another email sitting in your inbox, if you've only seen this one, with more commentary in it) -- I saw the typo in the fifth panel the second I hit "send," and it has been corrected. For once, I caught one on my own!!

And, in a hint to puzzled readers, Tom/Dan is referring to the missing word between "Supreme" and "Justice" in the fifth panel. The missing word starts with a "C" and ends with a "t."

And with that mystery solved, we have been distracted briefly from the real-life mystery of The *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King's COVID-19 infection and the news coming out of the White House — another distraction amidst the chaos of early October. If this is (fair & balanced) lunacy, 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]
Life In The Simulacron
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

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves