Arts&Culture

Tom Tomorrow is a syndicated cartoonist who has been a fixture in the Reno News & Review since 1995

Regular 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.

by Brian Breneman brianrb@newsreview.com

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

of vaguely remember. It’s like junk food—it gives you a quick hit of energy, and then it just passes right through you. Last time around, Herman Cain was kind of that candidate, and this time around Donald Trump is momentarily that candidate. Right now, there’s no really big news, so he’s getting a lot of attention, but I guarantee you in a couple of years we’re going to look back and say, “Oh god, remember when Donald Trump was running for president?” and it’ll just be this passing thing.

This is all just a long way of saying I don’t actually love presidential campaigns. There’s the superficiality and the tedium of it, and there’s just the heightened passion. Everyone gets kind of tense; everyone gets kind of angry.

How did you get involved with Pearl Jam? [Perkins did the album artwork for Pearl Jam’s 2009 album Backspacer.]

I had met Eddie Vedder once at a thing a long time ago, and as it turned out, he was a fan of my cartoon. I was chagrined to admit that at that moment I had not really listened to a lot of Pearl Jam. They kind of came along at a moment where, if I had the radio on, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh. I was just purely focused on political talk radio and news. I kinda dropped out of keeping up with music for a while. I’ve caught up with Pearl Jam in retrospect, and they’ve actually become, not even just because of the personal association, but they’ve actually brought me out to shows every couple of years, and it’s become one of the highlights of my life, because they are just an extraordinary band. Sometimes their music isn’t immediately accessible to the casual listener, but I just can’t praise them enough as musicians.

I had a vague relationship with Ed where I would occasionally send him some art or some press or something or let him know if I was coming through town. That went on for a long time, and then he was coming out near where I lived a bunch, and invited my wife and me to a show. That’s a very exciting thing. We actually sat on

a corner of the stage for the show, on some kind of equipment case or something, and it was really quite remarkable. Then when the Village Voice Media chain cut all their cartoons as a cost-cutting measure in 2009, there’s not much to be done in that circumstance, but this was such a brutal thing. It cost me so many newspapers—just almost callous, almost pointlessly. I think they would have saved as much money if they had just cut coffee out of the break rooms. I’m just not that expensive. It was a huge blow to my career. I felt like I’d been kneecapped because at that point [Village Voice Media] was in Kickstarter has been good to This Modern World cartoonist Dan Perkins. charge of all the major cities. I was trying to Photo CoURtESY oF DAN PERKINS push back on that—trying to get various friends in various cities to write letters to the editor—and I wrote Ed and asked him to write a letter to the Seattle Weekly. Around that time they had a new album coming out, and I was just on his mind—he asked if maybe I wanted to take a shot at [the album artwork], and it just turned into this really great collaboration and actually we became quite close friends and remain close friends to this day. He’s an extraordinary person, and it’s just been a very positive thing in my life.

The kickstarter is smashing goals. You hit your $87,000 goal in 22 hours, and you’re currently up to $176,000.

The amount we put up initially was the bare minimum amount to get the book printed and to get the people I’ve been working with some profit, but I was not going to make any money at that goal level. I just wanted to get the book printed, and I was actually afraid that we weren’t even going to make that goal. I was afraid that I’d have to ask my friends to pitch in and push us over the line 30 days after it started. I can’t even express to you how almost exhilarating it is to watch it take off like this. It feels like it’s happening to someone else. Ω For more information, visit www.kickstarter. com/projects/tomorrow/25-years-of-tomorrow 90 Auto Center Dr.

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