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by R.J. Carter Published: January 1, 2002
Maybe you’ve passed through an airport, a nightclub, or a really good bookstore and picked up one of those free newspapers--the kind that promote the local club scenes, the alternative literary markets, the 1-900 numbers. If you have, then the odds are good that you’ve seen Tom Tomorrow’s satirical comic, This Modern World, starring Sparky, the ultra-hip penguin. Ruthlessly mocking of the status quo and unrepentant in its jibes at political figures and corporate giants, Tom’s strips have been collected into a handful of books, including his newest release, When Penguins Attack, available now from St. Martin’s Press. I rang up Mr. Tomorrow (real name: Dan Perkins) to discuss comics, politics, and other things one is taught not to bring up in polite conversation. What got it all started, and why a penguin? Well, why not? (Laughs) I had this sort of clip-art world created, and I needed an outside voice, because everyone within the cartoon speaks in this sort of happy-talk advertising talk. I just needed a character who was a bit outside of that, and I had actually always drawn cartoons and stuff and I had this penguin obsession when I was a kid, so when the time came, the penguin just seemed the natural choice. How long have you been doing This Modern World? At least ten years now, right? Yeah. I’ve got a new book out which I’m calling my tenth year anniversary, but that’s just sort of arbitrary. I’ve probably been doing it closer to thirteen or fourteen years. Your work has a consistent style to it, with the zip-o-tones, clip-art, mechanical drafting--it’s very clean. Yet, it’s widely enjoyed by the alternative crowd who, in general, seem to prefer their artwork more... raw. Why do you think This Modern World has succeeded in that environment? I guess I have two answers to that. The first is that you don’t necessarily want to confuse the alternative press with the underground comics scene, because I think those are two different things. Second, I just think it’s due to the writing. I’ve worked very hard on the visual look of this cartoon, but I think the strength lies in the writing, and I think that’s what draws people in and I think that’s what keeps them coming back. I think if you don’t have a consistent quality of writing, if you don’t have something consistently to say or to amuse people with each week, then I don’t think people would keep coming back. What’s more important in your cartoons--the political message or being funny? Are you trying to make a statement or make a difference, or both? Well, both. Both are important. I mean, yes, I am trying to make a statement even though I recognize at the same time that the statements I make will have no effect whatsoever. I’m pretty disenchanted with the current election, and I’m frankly more enthused about Nader than about Gore or Bush, and I’m taking a lot of flak for that. I think what people need to keep in mind is that my previous stances against NAFTA and GATT and the WTO, and in favor of a single payer health care plan and things like that, have not actually had a great impact on the debate. (Laughs) I want to make the statement, that’s why I do it each week, but I also recognize that it’s going to have a very limited impact on anything. If I’m not funny--if I don’t try to be funny--I think people would get bored very quickly. So I think both things are equally important to me. You’re an outspoken supporter of Ralph Nader. How do you contrast him to Harry Browne as being a viable third-party candidate? "Viable third-party candidate" being the key part of your question. For one thing, I just agree with most of what Nader has to say, which is why I’ve been sort of talking about him--although, actually I’ve only done maybe three cartoons about Nader, but it sort of seems like more, and it just seems to upset people an awful lot. I have to say I’m a little bit amazed at how enthusiastic people are about Al Gore, given his chameleon-like nature and the extreme unlikelihood that he’s actually going to do anything more than pay lip service to the liberal Democratic issues in the same way that Bill Clinton has done this. As far as Harry Browne--how does he compare to Nader? Well, (a) I don’t really agree with him, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time drawing attention to him, but (b) he’s just not even on the radar in the way that Nader is on the radar. So it’s not worth my time to do a cartoon talking about why I disagree with him, because I really don’t think he’s in any way interesting in this election, whereas I think the things that Nader and, if Buchanan ever gets back out there--those two I find very fascinating. Obviously, I disagree with Pat Buchanan on most things, but I would really love to see the both of them in the debates. I think that would make the debate much more interesting, and it would also tend to show, if you had the extremes on the other side, what a very slim difference there is between the two main candidates. Do you think they’ll ever get into the debates? No, I think they’ve both been shut out entirely, and that, I think, is a shame. I clearly don’t expect Ralph Nader to win the election, and a lot of my advocacy is frankly just because I would very much like to see him in the debates. You attended both the GOP and DNC conventions. Why, if you’re a supporter of neither (and were there any good anecdotes from either which Sparky will mention in the near future?) (Laughs) I’m going as a journalist, I’m not going as a partisan. I’m going because I’m a political commentator, and the political conventions are "ground zero" of the process. I was on assignment for the Village Voice, and I did two pieces for them which were both two-pagers in full color, which I had to turn out in something like four days, which was immediately after the convention--an exhausting process. I discussed some of the anecdotes in there, and a few of them made it into my weekly strip. I saw a lot of really strange and interesting things and took part in a lot of interesting things. I was hanging out with a group of humorist friends, including Dave Barry, and as a result of that, I ended up one evening--through this thing that Dave set up--accompanying the mayor of Los Angeles to a party, with the six of us, cartoonists and Dave Barry, dressed up as Secret Service agents. Dark suits, sunglasses at night, and the hotel phone cords stuck in our ears. That was a pretty bizarre thing in itself, but it was this party being thrown by Patton Boggs, which is the main lobbying firm from DC, and one of the attendees, in whose honor the party was partially being thrown, was Terry McCullough, who’s the lead fund raiser for Al Gore. I was standing there with Mike Luckovich talking to Granny D [Doris Haddock], who’s the ninety-year-old woman who walked across the country to raise awareness of campaign finance reform, and Luckovich introduced Granny D to Terry McCullough. And I watched as Terry McCullough lectured her on how they’re both on the same side, he hates soft money, and if only that darned Republican congress would send the Democrats a bill, they would sign it. Which to me was just the most fascinating experience of the convention--it just summed it up in a nutshell. Who do you think is going to come out on top in this election? Gosh. I tend to think that anyone who makes a prediction much more than three or four days before the election is just really an idiot, because it’s so volatile. But if I were the Magic 8 Ball, I would say that at this point "All signs point to Gore." A lot of people are saying "Oh, Bush is just so stupid, there’s no way." But I have not that much faith in the public. I think Bush being stupid would not... ...stupidity has never stopped us before... It’s never stopped us before, exactly. Gore does seem to be doing pretty well right now, although, you never know. You once went on record criticizing Scott Adams’ Dilbert for not being as critical as it could, or should, have been of major corporations. (groans) Where are your feelings on that today, or do you even have any? Well, I’d have to say I don’t really have any. I occasionally glance at Dilbert, and it seems like a funny enough cartoon, and I think that’s fine. At the time, what set that off, was not so much Dilbert itself, but the fact that it was being presented in every article that you read--in Newsweek, in USA Today; I still have these clips--it was being presented as this radical critique of office work. And as someone who’s familiar with actual radical critiques of office work, involving systemic causes and things that just take a deeper look at what is actually wrong, I found that very offensive in the same way that I find it offensive to see Bill Clinton portrayed as the extreme left of political thought. If people accept that Bill Clinton is as far left as it gets in this country, then anyone who’s to the left of Bill Clinton, who doesn’t believe in welfare reform, who is troubled by economic globalization, then you’re just off the map. You don’t exist. And in that way I found it very troubling that Scott Adams was being presented as the radical critique of corporate culture, because I just didn’t really believe he was. I just thought he was doing another variation on Cathy, sort of basic jokes about "Aren’t bosses dumb?" and "Aren’t cubicles small?" And that’s fine, it’s funny enough when I read it. But it is not a systemic critique of corporate culture, and that was what troubled me. I have to say that there are a lot of Dilbert fans out there, and they were mightily offended by this and I just don’t give enough of a shit about Dilbert either way to be known as 'The Guy Who Doesn’t Like Dilbert.' But I still get email from people who run across that cartoon and write me to tell me how wrong I am. You stated in 1992 that you had "deliberately tried to avoid the comic book ghetto." Nearly ten years later, what are your feelings about the comic book industry? Golly. (Laughs). I’m glad to see that people like Dan Clowes are getting some recognition. And Chris Ware--is that guy just amazing, or what? Overall, I think that it’s still kind of a ghetto. I think that ever since Maus, you’ve had these perennial articles about "Oh, people are going to start reading comic books now!" and it just never quite seems to happen. But that’s fine--it’s a big country. Political cartoons are a sort of ghetto. Poetry is a sort of ghetto. I don’t think people should be discouraged by that, I think people just do what they do and find the audience for it. As I say, it’s a big country, and a very small percentage of that country can still give you a sizable audience. In addition to avoiding that sort of marginalization in favor of the marginalization that I did in fact choose, I just don’t think my stuff fits into that format that well. I’m much better at doing this four-panel weekly newspaper cartoon that I do, so I just don’t think it would have been that good of a match for me. But I don’t mean to be discouraging or unpleasant about it. So you wouldn’t consider doing a comic book? I would have a hard time finding the time to do a comic book. Do you read any? I have to admit, I am woefully overwhelmed with reading material, and I don’t have as much time to keep up with comics as I would like. Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes shared similar feelings about comic books. Oh, I know he wrote that really negative thing about comics in the back of one of his books, and I don’t feel that way at all. I always loved comics. I still have my comic book collection stashed away in the closet. I completely am doing this because I grew up reading everything from Robert Crumb to Stan Lee. It’s just I don’t have enough time anymore to keep up with it, and there’s all these things out and I don’t really know what any of them are, and I just don’t have time to sort through it. Is there a cultural difference between those who do strips and those who do the books? There is very clearly a difference, it a different audience. Editorial cartoonists, a lot of these guys are my friends, but they kind of seem to think that their kind of cartooning is the only kind that exists, and they are the only kind that’s legitimate. I get a certain amount of grief from those guys for being so wordy, but the thing is I grew up reading more comic book type humor--more Mad Magazine type stuff--which is always very word-heavy, very dependent on the text to move things along, and I think I brought a lot of that with me into the newspaper format. It’s just different worlds. The political cartoonists pay attention to what they’re doing, and the comic book artists pay attention to what they’re doing... and people do seem to just stay in their own... I mean, you won’t see so many comic book people at a political cartooning or an editorial cartoonist convention, and you rarely see editorial people at San Diego or anything like that. How do you feel about the people who cross the bridge from doing strips to doing comics? Are they selling out? No, no. Certainly, Chris Ware is not selling out. (Laughs) I don’t see that Chris Ware is making great strides to be ever more commercial. He’s clearly being very true to his vision. For Matt Groening, you probably have to make certain compromises to get your work on television, but I have to say The Simpsons still seems like a remarkably pure vision to me. It’s an extraordinary achievement. Whatever compromises he had to make, they certainly don’t show up in the show. If he’s gotten fabulously wealthy, more power to him--I don’t think anybody ever took a vow of poverty here. Selling out is if I was suddenly offered money to support George W. Bush, and I did so, that’s selling out. Selling out is when you say things you don’t believe in pursuit of the dollar, and I don’t see anybody doing that. Tell us about your new book, When Penguins Attack. It’s a compilation of the last couple of years of weekly strips, and it has a really cool 3-D cover--a little 3-D postcard sort of thing that I got them to do as an insert in the cover, which was sort of like pulling teeth but I’m really happy with it. 
In your daily life, you still maintain the secret identity of Dan Perkins. What’s the secret origin of "Tom Tomorrow"? How did you come up with the name? It reminds me of my favorite TerryToons character, Tom Terrific.Yeah, that’s actually what inspired it. That was in the back of my mind when I came up with the name. I was running in a journal in San Francisco, that was actually a radical critique of office culture, next to which Dilbert is considerably less subversive, to be nice, because, as I say, I really don’t want to re-ignite that whole Dilbert controversy--I like Dilbert; it’s a fine cartoon; please don’t write me, Dilbert fans! (Laughs) It’s fine, I have no problem with it, and I just want to forget the whole thing! But I was running in this thing called Processed World, a zine put out by temps and so forth, and people had pen names because this was a very radical journal, and there was a good chance you would end up getting blacklisted from your temp agency or something if you were known to be contributing to this thing. And I also just thought that it was a good mnemonic device. I thought it would be easier for people to remember it, and I also just never expected that anyone was really going to be paying attention to what I was doing, so I didn’t think it really mattered. Then once I sort of started getting my stuff out there a little bit, I kind of was stuck with the pen name, so I’m constantly saying, "Oh, yes, yes, I’m Dan... I mean I’m... I do this Tom Tomorrow cartoon..." It’s constantly this awkward, ridiculous thing, but I’m sort of stuck with it. |
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