Dan Perkins (born 5 April 1961 in Wichita, Kansas) 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 U.S., as well as on Salon.com and Working for Change. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He 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, he writes a daily political weblog, also entitled This Modern World, which he began in December 2001. Perkins had a development deal with Saturday Night Live in 1999. Several animated cartoons were produced using the voice talent of Will Ferrell, Darrell Hammond and other SNL regulars, but none made it on the air. He also spent a year working with Michael Moore on a screenplay for an animated film, which Moore abandoned to work on his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.
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This Modern World
While other editorial cartoons often focus their ridicule at the top, making fun of presidents or other leadership figures, This Modern World additionally focuses on the average person and ostensible mentalities of those who support leaders and policies, as well as the popular media. To add irony, it often uses 1950s-style ad caricatures to imply parallels between the Cold War 1950s and recent political environments.
Books
There are seven cartoon anthologies currently in print:
- Greetings From This Modern World
- Tune in Tomorrow
- The Wrath of Sparky
- Penguin Soup for the Soul
- When Penguins Attack
- The Great Big Book of Tomorrow (Spring 2003)
- Hell in a Handbasket (March 2006)
The anthologies were published by St. Martin's Press until Hell in a Handbasket, when Perkins switched to Tarcher.
Trivia
- According to his weblog, Perkins spent three days on a bus in fall 2004 with John Sayles, Steve Earle, Kris Kristofferson and Daryl Hannah, on a bus ride through the American Southwest promoting Sayles' film Silver City.
- Also according to his blog, he once took part in a The Flaming Lips concert in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, dancing on stage in a penguin costume.
Contemporaries
Thematically sympathetic cartoonists to Perkins include:
External links
- This Modern World, Tom Tomorrow's weblog
- Current This Modern World comics on CREDO Action
- Article on the development and early years of the strip
- Buzzflash Interview: Tom Tomorrow, Author of "This Modern World"
- Beyond Chron Profile: Tom Tomorrow
- Tom Tomorrow's Hell in a Handbasket by Glenn Greenwald
- Debunking Thomas Friedman's "I lost my job to India and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" story.
