Like All Sensible People, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) Has Pre-Election 2020 Jitters

In yesterday's email which brought today's TMW 'toon to the blogger's In Box, Tom/Dan also wrote about the 2020 election:

Hey all,

Well here we are, on the weekend before the week that determines the fate of our country, whether we can pull this bird out of its nosedive and start trying to stabilize our altitude or … not. I’ll confess I am a single issue voter this year, and my issue is to avoid the country’s tailspin into full fascism and autocracy. There will be a whole lot to sort out if we survive this, but the first imperative is to get Donald Trump (and his craven enablers) the absolute fuck out of power. I waited in line four hours to vote early in New York City because there was no fucking way I was going to miss my chance to cast my vote against that son of a bitch.

As for the cartoon, this quadrennial weekend is one of the more complicated challenges I face — the pre-election deadline, (mostly) post-election publication week. I always have to find some way to hedge my bets — the “DIY Funnies” format is one I have used on two other occasions, in 2004 and again in 2016. Initially I tried to isolate the line about events occurring which no person who had to write about it all in advance could have possibly foreseen, because I wanted Blinky to say, “I feel (sorry)/(extremely sorry) for anyone in THAT impossible position!” But I ultimately needed to go with the multiple-choice format for Sparky’s word balloon, and I couldn’t have Blinky responding to one of the options alone without undermining the whole premise of the cartoon, so I had to let that little self-referential bit go.

Here’s hoping the worst-case scenarios for next week are the ones that get crossed off this week’s cartoon. Oh, and RIP Sean Connery, the one true James Bond. I have a large original French “From Russia With Love” poster on my living room wall, and almost every day I spend at least a millisecond thinking about two things: the fact that the iconic James Bond gun on many Bond posters was actually an air pistol somebody dug up for a photo shoot at the last minute because they forgot the Walther PPK prop from the movie; and wow, did James Bond have terrible trigger discipline. Personally, I’ve been meaning to re-watch the extremely weird cult sci fi movie "Zardoz," and tonight might be the night for that.

Deep breaths everyone. Until next week …

Dan/Tom

And that... is Tom Tomorrow's final word until a week after the damnable election. If this is (fair & balanced) commentary about public life in 2020, 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]
DIY Funnies
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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