Explore popular quotes and sayings by an editor Tom Tomorrow.
Last updated on December 19, 2024.
Tom Tomorrow is the pen name of editorial cartoonist Dan Perkins. His weekly comic strip, This Modern World, which comments on current events, appears regularly in more than 80 newspapers across the United States and Canada as of 2015, as well as in The Nation, The Nib, Truthout, and the Daily Kos, where he was the former comics curator and now is a regular contributor. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Spin, Mother Jones, Esquire, The Economist, Salon, The American Prospect, CREDO Action, and AlterNet.
My biggest influence growing up was Mad magazine, which is a very text-heavy form of visual satire. I didn’t grow up wanting to draw donkeys and elephants with the names of politicians written across them.
My cartoons appear in newspapers, which are full of words, but there's something about having it in this little box that confounds people's expectations.
I don't think that what I'm doing [political cartooning] is necessarily left versus right. What I'm addressing is top versus bottom. If I'm not spending a lot of time making fun of the more extreme elements of the Green Party, it's because what I do is to critique power.
Politics, like advertising, is about people selling you things you didn't really want or need.
Good satire is about attacking the powerful, and that tends to be more the purview of the left. Maybe there's something about the conservative mindset that confuses mean-spirited name-calling and insults with actual humor.
To keep doing this job [draw political cartoons] week after week, I think you have to want to change the world, while understanding that you can't. You have to hold both of those contradictory ideas simultaneously.
Our basic civil liberties are in jeopardy, but we're going to be spending our time as a society arguing about whether or not schoolchildren should be forced to pay tribute to imaginary invisible beings who live in magical kingdoms in outer space some
I don't think being a cynic is necessarily a negative thing. It's a matter of seeing the world with clear and open eyes.