Tom Tomorrow is a syndicated cartoonist who has been a fixture in the Reno News & Review since 1995
by Brian Breneman brianrb@newsreview.com
R
egular readers of this paper might be familiar with the name Tom Tomorrow. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, you might recognize his characters—a penguin incredulous at the conduct of Congress, a friendly-looking drone all too happy to advise children of his military capability, or Invisible Hand of the Free Market Man, a talking hand extolling the virtues of capitalism run amok. Tom Tomorrow is the pen name of political cartoonist Dan Perkins. He’s been a fixture in the Reno News & Review since 1995. He’s currently hosting a Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of a career retrospective called 25 Years of Tomorrow, featuring every cartoon he’s ever published plus archival photos and annotation by the author. We spoke to him about Pearl Jam, right-wing humor and the 2016 election season.
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JULY 23, 2015
How did you develop an interest in cartooning? I don’t know that I ever really had a choice in the matter. It’s just ever since I was a little kid, I just loved the art form. I was in love with Peanuts when I was 4 or 5 years old. It was always the thing that spoke to me and as I got older, Mad magazine, Doonesbury and Zippy the Pinhead, I was such a big fan of all of them.
Would you consider yourself to be a liberal voice? I think that’s a pretty fair assessment.
It seems that satirical voices tend to be liberal. Do you think that’s true? You’re gonna get me in trouble here because this is a thing that our friends on the right don’t really like to hear. But there’s just
something about right-wing humor that tends to punch down rather than up and comes across as mean.
You feel like you’re punching up? Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure that’s exactly right, because ... if you’re doing some right-wing humor, certainly if you’re satirizing Obama, he’s the president of the United States, certainly that’s punching up. There’s just something about it that, I mean, maybe it’s really about shared expectations or shared underlying assumptions, but there’s a general sense that right-wing humor is not all that funny. I’ll tell you what it is: It’s like when Fox News tries to create their own version of The Daily Show or something. They’re just kind of angry and turning out joke-like things that aren’t actually jokes, where The Daily Show is actually putting out jokes that are funny.
What’s your take on the 2016 election so far? People have this idea that this is like my best time, because it’s when everyone is focused on politics, but the thing is the campaigns drag on for so long, there’s so little to say about them. The Republican field is so crowded with lunatics. Presumably, they’ll weed it down to a plausible candidate at some point, but right now it’s mostly choked with lunatics who are never going to be president, and I find that those cartoons—when I go back and read over them as I’ve been going back and reading over everything this past year—I found that those cartoons about those flash-in-the-pan candidates that we’re all chitter-chattering about momentarily have the least shelf life. I went through and annotated a lot of the cartoons to add context, and one of the things I was constantly adding was explaining why I have this character or this politician that you can barely remember who he was, saying this thing that you kind
