Tom Tomorrow.

• Author: Elias, Robert
• Position: The Progressive Interview - Interview

Cartoonist Dan Perkins, better known as Tom Tomorrow, has been drawing his weekly "This Modern World" cartoon strip for nearly twenty years. The strip first appeared in the groundbreaking zinc Processed World after Perkins moved to San Francisco in 1984. The cartoon began as a tour through consumer culture and the drudgeries of work. Perkins's outrage at the Gulf War coverage in 1991 provoked a shift in focus to politics and the media. "This Modern World" is syndicated and appears in more than 130 U.S. newspapers. Perkins's cartoons have also appeared in Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, The American Prospect, Z Magazine, Peace Review, Sojourners, and TV Guide, as well as in numerous books. He produced three short animations (never aired) for Saturday Night Live and has run a blog (a web diary of commentaries) on his site, www.thismodernworld. com, for the past year. He's the author of several books: Greetings From This Modern Worm (1992), Tune In Tomorrow (1994), The Wrath of Sparky (1996), Penguin Soup for the Soul (1998), and When Penguins Attack/(2000)--all published by St. Martins Press. His forthcoming book, The Great Big Book of Tomorrow, will be out later this year. Perkins has become a potent satirist and political critic. He moved to Brooklyn a few years ago, and when I interviewed him his car had just been stolen. Even so, he seemed to be in a reasonably good mood.

Q: Your cartoons are distinguished by their humor and their wordiness.

Tom Tomorrow: I try to keep a balance between the wordiness and the humor. I may go off in one direction or the other from week to week, but they're both important. The commentary is what keeps it fresh and interesting to me, and allows me to keep doing this week after week without going insane, as I surely would if I were drawing a comic strip poking gentle fun at the foibles that make us all human, maybe with some adorable children and a talking animal of some sort. But if I'm only ranting and raving, if it's not funny, then no one's going to waste their time reading it. And why should they?

But humor is very subjective. The most frequent response I get from conservatives is, "That's not even funny." As if there is some objective standard of humor, something you could program into a computer and quantify. In reality, whether you think a political cartoon is funny or not mostly depends on whether you agree with the underlying assumptions of the cartoonist.

Q: The characters in your strip often seem drawn from 1950s advertisements. Your strip has an old-fashioned feel, yet it's called "This Modern World," and your pen name is "Tom Tomorrow."

Tomorrow: The strip began by satirizing the ways in which our society worships and fetishizes consumerism and technology. In appropriating these images of cheerful consumers from the fifties, I was deliberately setting up a sort of dissonance--the future never quite seems to happen the way the public...