In the email which brought today's "This Modern World" 'toon, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) also wrote:
Hey, an early newsletter this week as I start to close up shop for the holidays. Remember! Don’t share this publicly until next Monday, or my paying clients will get pissed at me, and I can’t afford to lose any more of them if I can avoid it. This is probably the last new cartoon of this annus horribilis, the year of our dark lord 2020. Most of my clients have early holiday deadlines, and the holidays snuck up on me this year — I didn’t get two cartoons done far enough in advance, so next week will be an evergreen from the past, unless I get super inspired during Christmas week and crank out one more for the year. But half my outlets won’t even run it if I do (because of the aforementioned early deadlines), and … even cartoonists need to take a little mental health time now and again. Maybe even especially cartoonists who spend all their time immersed in the firehose of sewage that is the daily news cycle. Speaking entirely hypothetically, of course. But be sure to open next week’s newsletter anyway! There will be bonus content of some sort!
2020 was… a year, that’s for damn sure. In conclusion, 2020 was a land of many contrasts, as the meme goes. I was at the start of a promising relationship at the beginning of 2020, and the first few months of this year were very good ones. Then everything in the world went sideways overnight. Unfortunately it was a relationship that required airplane travel, and the complication of a deadly Pandemic… wasn’t helpful. Suffice it to say, I didn’t quite end up with the 2020 I was planning and hoping for, a year that briefly seemed full of possibility and adventure. But of course no one got the 2020 they were hoping for.
I think we can all agree, this year has been a lot. Burn it down, scatter the ashes, salt the earth where it stood and never speak its name again.
And I always want to acknowledge, I’m one of the lucky ones, I’m healthy and I haven’t had anyone in my life succumb to the virus. But this thing has cost all of us, in one way or another. Every single one of us has lost something during this shitty fucking year, even those of us who haven’t faced the ultimate loss. We are a nation of people just beginning to come to terms with our collective grief. I don’t think any of us are going to come out of this year of quarantine and isolation and fear and sadness unchanged. I don’t think any of us are the same people we were a year ago.
At least we got Trump out of office (hopefully).
The only “behind the scenes” note I have on this cartoon is about the wording of the second word balloon in the third panel. Initially it did not contain the line “if I really like you,” but as I was writing it, I read a story about the White House Security Director, who was in the hospital for three months and had his leg amputated as a result of Covid. I didn’t have room to specifically reference that story, but I wanted to make it clear that even within Trump’s orbit, life- and health-saving treatment is still handed out subject to his whims.
And as we inch slowly toward a New Year, I’m hoping the optimism I once had for this one is more warranted for the next.
With much gratitude to you all,
Dan/Tom
And, this blogger joins Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) in holiday wishes. Despite the blogger's bluster in the 12/19/2020 post about making this blog free of mention of The Loser (whose name starts with "T" and rhymes with "Chump"), "The Modern World" 'toon is driven by the news cycle and its endless mention of The Loser. If this is the (fair & balanced) reaction to the curse of the daily news in 2020, so be it. And, as long as The Loser in the 2020 election is plotting to declare martial law in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and stage a "re-vote" under military supervision prior to the Inaugural Ceremony on January 20, 2021...
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x TMW]
Early Holiday Edition!
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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