Which Night Is Scarier In 2020 — Halloween Or Election Results?

In the email that delivered today's TMW 'toon, the 'toonist (Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins) wrote:

Hey All,

This one was really fun to work on. Nothing like a having a nice holiday theme to give you a little inspiration. (Obviously you need to read the ghost dialogue in SCAAAAARY GHOST VOOOOICES). This is also basically my final cartoon before the election — next week I’ll be trying to split the difference on that once-every-four-years problem of a pre-election deadline with post-election publication.

I knew I was going to do some sort of haunted house thing, but I had to figure out the underlying theme. Was it going to be a house of actual horrors — kids in cages, militias, etc.? Or, what I ultimately went with, a cartoon emphasizing the ways in which Trump is trying to scare his own base? (I also had one draft in which the two characters were undecided voters who were completely unterrified by all of it, but it didn’t really work all that well and I don’t think undecided voters are much of a factor this election.)

Pretty early on it occurred to me that the obvious title was “Trump Tower of Terror.” Which then presented the problem of gesturing visually toward a skyscraper shape in the title panel, but I think that ended up working out reasonably well.

I also knew that I wanted Trump to evoke the old EC horror comics Crypt-Keeper narrator/character (I don’t know much about the subsequent tv show but he may be familiar to some of you from that). The look of that character evolved over the years — in the tv show, he has a much more skeletal/rotting corpse appearance. I needed it to still be a recognizable caricature of Trump, so I opted to go with the simpler, original comic book version.

Some of you will undoubtedly wonder why I didn't use the EC comics font (last seen in the Thing That Ate America's Brain). The problem is, that font takes up much more real estate than my normal font -- I couldn't squeeze in everything that I wanted to squeeze in, using it.

Anyway, as we finally approach this election, it’s a truly terrifying Halloween season. Let’s hope we are finally about to wake up from this endless nightmare.

Be safe and be well,

Dan

PS: New book! New book! New book!

PPS: My friend Ruben Bolling ["Tom the Dancing Bug"] and I got a nice joint writeup in the Washington Post on Friday.

In closing, as Halloween and Election Day are looming, if this is a (fair & balanced) lampoon of US politics, 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]
Trump Tower Of Terror
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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