Tom Tomorrow Celebrates 25 Years of Cartooning With a Massive Retrospective If you're old enough to know who Sparky the penguin is, you'll want to own this book.
—By Dave Gilson | Mon Jul. 6, 2015 6:00 AM EDT
Tom Tomorrow
The average lifespan of an Antarctic emperor penguin is 15 to 20 years. The average lifespan of an American comic strip is probably far shorter. Both are reasons to celebrate the 25th anniversary of This Modern World, Tom Tomorrow's unconventional political comic strip starring the endearingly acerbic Sparky the penguin.
Earlier this year, Tomorrow (AKA Dan Perkins) was nominated for a Pulitzer—not bad for an independent cartoonist who got his start in zines and alt-weeklies and survived the bumpy switch from newsprint to pixels, not to mention two Bush administrations. To commemorate this odds-defying accomplishment, Tomorrow has spent the past year tracking down just about everything he's drawn since 1990 and compiling it in a massive, two-volume set that he's self-publishing through a just-launched Kickstarter campaign. In addition to the awesome-looking collection, incentives for funding the project include a stuffed Sparky, swag from TMW pals Pearl Jam, and a chance to indelibly ink Tomorrow with an image of America's favorite flightless political observer.
Mother Jones: Sorry to put a damper on things, but I heard that print is dead. What are you doing compiling a 1,000-page, 15-pound set of volumes for people to buy?
Tom Tomorrow: The same people who say that print is dead are the same people who say that the future of print is artisanal. And I see this as a very artisanal project!
MJ: Tell me how you got the idea to put together almost everything you've done over 25 years. this modern world
A mockup of the 25-year This Modern World compendium Tom Tomorrow
TT: A couple of years ago, I ran across this big Taschen two-volume set of midcentury advertising. As I was looking at this whole package, something just clicked because I realized that my 25th anniversary was coming up. I always mark 1990 as the real start of my career because that's when the strip started getting picked up; it's when it stared getting political. (It's a little bit of an arbitrary date; really if you wanted to mark an anniversary it would have to be when I turned five, because I always drew cartoons as a kid.) But 1990 effectively marks 25 years as a professional cartoonist, and that's a big chunk of my life. And I thought it shouldn't pass without marking the moment.
MJ: Has going though 25 years of work been nostalgic?
TT: I wouldn't say it's been nostalgic. Initially, it was horrifying! The very early work, it makes me cringe a little bit. And then it gets pretty good within a couple of years, and I was relieved to find I was actually proud of it. A lot of this stuff I hadn't read in 20, 25 years. I was kind of surprised how well it held up, honestly.
MJ: Well, you've been hitting so many of the same themes throughout your career. Which topics or throughlines did you see as you went through your work?
TT: Certainly gun control, on which we've made almost no progress in 25 years. Heath care is a very interesting one as a person who's been a freelancer for 25 years. For a country that celebrates entrepreneurship, the peculiar American linkage of health care to employment status is puzzling. Obviously we have made progress on that one.
MJ: Some of the political figures, like the Clintons and Bushes, haven't changed.
TT: Yeah, I'm looking at all these years I've spent writing about the Bush family and hoping I don't have to do that beyond this next election. sparky the penguin.
Sparky, always the optimist Tom Tomorrow
MJ: How has your perspective on the strip changed?
TT: In 1990 there was no internet, there were no blogs, there was no social media. In those days I really viewed the strip as a vehicle for conveying information that people might not have had access to elsewhere. I don't see it quite in that light anymore; I assume people know how to use search engines. I think it's gotten a little more playful and less didactic. It's still the wordiest strip out there, but less than it used to be.
MJ: One of incentives for the stretch goals is that if you read your top goal, you will get a Sparky tattoo.
TT: It would be my first tattoo of my own creation. It's crazy expensive to make this; all the money is going to printers and to everyone that I've been working with who deserve to be paid for their work. It's been a tremendous amount of work to get this stuff located and scanned and sequenced. It's a labor of love until we hit some stretch goals. If we reach them, I was just trying to think of some extravagant gesture to show how much that would mean to me. So I just threw in the tattoo. I honestly didn't think about it a lot. I may come to regret it!
The world meets Sparky, 1991 Tom Tomorrow
Make Tom Tomorrow's regrets—and dreams!—a reality at his Kickstarter page.
I was at the page when they had 10 left, but couldn't pull the trigger on a signed vinyl for $500.
That seems crazy high to me, but maybe that's just me.
I was hesitant on buying Megadeth's new album signed for $75, until I saw how fast they were selling out. Remembering that, this was a definite no for me.
I hear ya. Good chance there will be more PJ stuff be offered based on Tom's targeted "Stretch Goals". Excited for TT/DP that he's so close so quickly to hitting his funding goal.
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Standing in the Jersey rain… Posts: 14,490
I was at the page when they had 10 left, but couldn't pull the trigger on a signed vinyl for $500.
That seems crazy high to me, but maybe that's just me.
I was hesitant on buying Megadeth's new album signed for $75, until I saw how fast they were selling out. Remembering that, this was a definite no for me.
You PJ people are crazy!!!
I don't think $500 is crazy high especially when you have the guarantee of it being genuine since it is coming right from the band. You would pay almost that much on eBay where 90% of autographs are fakes. If I was intent on getting an album autographed this would be the route to go even if you have to pay a little bit more. A genuine album that cost $500 is much better than a fake that costs $400.
1996: Randall's Island 2 1998: East Rutherford | MSG 1 & 2 2000: Cincinnati | Columbus | Jones Beach 1, 2, & 3 | Boston 1 | Camden 1 & 2 2003: Philadelphia | Uniondale | MSG 1 & 2 | Holmdel 2005: Atlantic City 1 2006: Camden 1 | East Rutherford 1 & 2 2008: Camden 1 & 2 | MSG 1 & 2 | Newark (EV) 2009: Philadelphia 1, 2 & 4 2010: Newark | MSG 1 & 2 2011: Toronto 1 2013: Wrigley Field | Brooklyn 2 | Philadelphia 1 & 2 | Baltimore 2015: Central Park 2016: Philadelphia 1 & 2 | MSG 1 & 2 | Fenway Park 2 | MSG (TOTD) 2017: Brooklyn (RnR HOF) 2020: MSG | Asbury Park2021: Asbury Park 2022: MSG | Camden | Nashville 2024: MSG 1 & 2 (#50) | Philadelphia 1 & 2 | Baltimore
yeah its almost impossible to get an item (let alone vinyl) signed by all of the guys and know that its authentic. Charity stuff and the rare 10club contests really.
The way i view it. Theyre my generation's Stones. This is going to be amazing hanging in the bonus room
yeah its almost impossible to get an item (let alone vinyl) signed by all of the guys and know that its authentic. Charity stuff and the rare 10club contests really.
This quote above is what makes the $500 a steal in my opinion.
I was at the page when they had 10 left, but couldn't pull the trigger on a signed vinyl for $500.
That seems crazy high to me, but maybe that's just me.
I was hesitant on buying Megadeth's new album signed for $75, until I saw how fast they were selling out. Remembering that, this was a definite no for me.
You PJ people are crazy!!!
I don't think $500 is crazy high especially when you have the guarantee of it being genuine since it is coming right from the band. You would pay almost that much on eBay where 90% of autographs are fakes. If I was intent on getting an album autographed this would be the route to go even if you have to pay a little bit more. A genuine album that cost $500 is much better than a fake that costs $400.
This is exactly the conclusion that I came to. There is a small possibility that I might someday get an album autographed in person through a friend of mine who has an in, but that will be a whole other cool thing. The fact that this record has all the signatures and comes with provenance is a huge deal. I will have something that is genuine and will require a frame. It will be a treasured piece of art that I will enjoy. PLUS you get the book. Can't wait to read it.
1991- Hollywood Palladium, California with Temple of the Dog, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains -RIP Magazine Show Oct. 6th 1992- Lollapalooza, Irvine, California Nothing since then. I suck. 2016- Fenway Park, Boston - Both glorious nights 2022- Oakland Night 2 2024 Sacramento, CA
I wonder what other PJ possibilities there are? Maybe some Fixer singles signed?
1991- Hollywood Palladium, California with Temple of the Dog, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains -RIP Magazine Show Oct. 6th 1992- Lollapalooza, Irvine, California Nothing since then. I suck. 2016- Fenway Park, Boston - Both glorious nights 2022- Oakland Night 2 2024 Sacramento, CA
Greetings from the world of Tomorrow Posted by Tom Tomorrow
Hey all,
Well that was quite the launch.
The first glimmerings of this project came to me in Quebec City, Canada in 2013. I had been invited to be part of the Nation magazine's yearly fundraising cruise, which that year went up the East Coast on a fall leaf-season expedition. I was wandering around QC with my family and stopped in a bookstore, where I saw Taschen's huge two volume Midcentury Advertising set. It was too big to carry with me then, but I ordered it as soon as I got home.
Sometime around Feburary 2014, I realized that 2015 was going to constitute the 25th anniversary of This Modern World. The Taschen book was sitting out in my studio and as I was looking at it one day, something clicked and I suddenly knew exactly what I wanted to do.
But I was going to need help. I've been working for a few years with a company called Topatoco, who mostly specialize in helping webcartoonists merchandise their stuff. They're fantastic people, and they have a spinoff company called Make That Thing, which helps usher incompetent people like myself through the Kickstarter process, start to finish. Now, I've had some good t-shirt sales with Topatoco, but I don't think the last compilation we put out together, WORLD OF TOMORROW, did especially well. Nonetheless, when I pitched the idea of a two volume, thousand page hardcover compilation of every TMW cartoon, they shrugged and said, "Sure."
And so last summer we got to work.
A lot of this was on me, obviously—it took me most of last summer just to get all the work organized. All my digital weekly strips are neatly filed and named, so that was easy enough, but I've done a lot of one-offs for people over the years that had weird names and were stuck in some random sub-sub-sub folder on an old backup drive somewhere—you can imagine how much fun I had sorting all of that out! And my work from 1990 through 2000 was pre-digital (a mixture of xerox, pen and ink, and zip-a-tone, these are the originals some of you have pledged to receive), and a significant number of these didn't even have dates on them. So I had to sort them out, make my best guess as to when they ran, mostly by cross-checking with my old books—but I had this dumb habit of trying to sequence the cartoons in those books to emphasize readability rather than chronology, so those were all out of order as well. And then there's the further complication that I would do work for someplace like The Nation in a format to fit their page, and then re-format the cartoon and use it as vacation backup for my weekly syndicated strip, meaning that the same cartoon might have appeared in different places years apart—and there were at least a dozen of these duplicates scattered throughout the book as it began to come together, that I had to track down! I'm still not 100% certain that I got them all.
Anyway it's been a long road with absolutely no certainty that it was ever going to pay off. I spent a lot of time going back and forth with the MTT team on the initial goal to shoot for, because I wanted to cut this thing as close as possible, did not want to risk a failed Kickstarter. The great thing about blowing so far past the initial goal so quickly is that now we've got wiggle room, for unanticipated expenses or cost overruns, which otherwise were simply going to have come out of my pocket. Yep—at $87K, there was still a significant chance this thing was going to cost me money. That's how badly I wanted to make this real.
So this has been a pretty amazing day and a half since we launched, and I thank you all sincerely for embracing this crazy idea I have been working so hard on for so long.
Ok, Dave. Just release the guitar you backed and I'll jump on it...then you can just back a copy of the book. Your wife can thank me.
haha, F5ing today won't help so take the day off boys! Unfortunately it's not my guitar as i'm not that crazy but how much would you contribute for a used and signed microphone by this EV (me)? (not the real EV)? HAHA...I can throw that in there!
Ok, Dave. Just release the guitar you backed and I'll jump on it...then you can just back a copy of the book. Your wife can thank me.
haha, F5ing today won't help so take the day off boys! Unfortunately it's not my guitar as i'm not that crazy but how much would you contribute for a used and signed microphone by this EV (me)? (not the real EV)? HAHA...I can throw that in there!
For that...how about a hug and a Coke with your name on it?!?
Ok, Dave. Just release the guitar you backed and I'll jump on it...then you can just back a copy of the book. Your wife can thank me.
haha, F5ing today won't help so take the day off boys! Unfortunately it's not my guitar as i'm not that crazy but how much would you contribute for a used and signed microphone by this EV (me)? (not the real EV)? HAHA...I can throw that in there!
For that...how about a hug and a Coke with your name on it?!?
I will take the hug. I don't drink soda if possible!
Comments
Tom Tomorrow Celebrates 25 Years of Cartooning With a Massive Retrospective
If you're old enough to know who Sparky the penguin is, you'll want to own this book.
—By Dave Gilson
| Mon Jul. 6, 2015 6:00 AM EDT
Tom Tomorrow
The average lifespan of an Antarctic emperor penguin is 15 to 20 years. The average lifespan of an American comic strip is probably far shorter. Both are reasons to celebrate the 25th anniversary of This Modern World, Tom Tomorrow's unconventional political comic strip starring the endearingly acerbic Sparky the penguin.
Earlier this year, Tomorrow (AKA Dan Perkins) was nominated for a Pulitzer—not bad for an independent cartoonist who got his start in zines and alt-weeklies and survived the bumpy switch from newsprint to pixels, not to mention two Bush administrations. To commemorate this odds-defying accomplishment, Tomorrow has spent the past year tracking down just about everything he's drawn since 1990 and compiling it in a massive, two-volume set that he's self-publishing through a just-launched Kickstarter campaign. In addition to the awesome-looking collection, incentives for funding the project include a stuffed Sparky, swag from TMW pals Pearl Jam, and a chance to indelibly ink Tomorrow with an image of America's favorite flightless political observer.
Mother Jones: Sorry to put a damper on things, but I heard that print is dead. What are you doing compiling a 1,000-page, 15-pound set of volumes for people to buy?
Tom Tomorrow: The same people who say that print is dead are the same people who say that the future of print is artisanal. And I see this as a very artisanal project!
MJ: Tell me how you got the idea to put together almost everything you've done over 25 years.
this modern world
A mockup of the 25-year This Modern World compendium Tom Tomorrow
TT: A couple of years ago, I ran across this big Taschen two-volume set of midcentury advertising. As I was looking at this whole package, something just clicked because I realized that my 25th anniversary was coming up. I always mark 1990 as the real start of my career because that's when the strip started getting picked up; it's when it stared getting political. (It's a little bit of an arbitrary date; really if you wanted to mark an anniversary it would have to be when I turned five, because I always drew cartoons as a kid.) But 1990 effectively marks 25 years as a professional cartoonist, and that's a big chunk of my life. And I thought it shouldn't pass without marking the moment.
MJ: Has going though 25 years of work been nostalgic?
TT: I wouldn't say it's been nostalgic. Initially, it was horrifying! The very early work, it makes me cringe a little bit. And then it gets pretty good within a couple of years, and I was relieved to find I was actually proud of it. A lot of this stuff I hadn't read in 20, 25 years. I was kind of surprised how well it held up, honestly.
MJ: Well, you've been hitting so many of the same themes throughout your career. Which topics or throughlines did you see as you went through your work?
TT: Certainly gun control, on which we've made almost no progress in 25 years. Heath care is a very interesting one as a person who's been a freelancer for 25 years. For a country that celebrates entrepreneurship, the peculiar American linkage of health care to employment status is puzzling. Obviously we have made progress on that one.
MJ: Some of the political figures, like the Clintons and Bushes, haven't changed.
TT: Yeah, I'm looking at all these years I've spent writing about the Bush family and hoping I don't have to do that beyond this next election.
sparky the penguin.
Sparky, always the optimist Tom Tomorrow
MJ: How has your perspective on the strip changed?
TT: In 1990 there was no internet, there were no blogs, there was no social media. In those days I really viewed the strip as a vehicle for conveying information that people might not have had access to elsewhere. I don't see it quite in that light anymore; I assume people know how to use search engines. I think it's gotten a little more playful and less didactic. It's still the wordiest strip out there, but less than it used to be.
MJ: One of incentives for the stretch goals is that if you read your top goal, you will get a Sparky tattoo.
TT: It would be my first tattoo of my own creation. It's crazy expensive to make this; all the money is going to printers and to everyone that I've been working with who deserve to be paid for their work. It's been a tremendous amount of work to get this stuff located and scanned and sequenced. It's a labor of love until we hit some stretch goals. If we reach them, I was just trying to think of some extravagant gesture to show how much that would mean to me. So I just threw in the tattoo. I honestly didn't think about it a lot. I may come to regret it!
The world meets Sparky, 1991 Tom Tomorrow
Make Tom Tomorrow's regrets—and dreams!—a reality at his Kickstarter page.
That seems crazy high to me, but maybe that's just me.
I was hesitant on buying Megadeth's new album signed for $75, until I saw how fast they were selling out. Remembering that, this was a definite no for me.
You PJ people are crazy!!!
The way i view it. Theyre my generation's Stones. This is going to be amazing hanging in the bonus room
From TT's Twitter:
also gonna have some new rewards up in a couple days
WE'RE NOT DONE HERE PEOPLE
1992- Lollapalooza, Irvine, California
Nothing since then. I suck.2016- Fenway Park, Boston - Both glorious nights
2022- Oakland Night 2
2024 Sacramento, CA
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2015/07/06/kickstarter-of-the-day-this-modern-world-book-campaign-hits-100k-within-hours-qa/
1992- Lollapalooza, Irvine, California
Nothing since then. I suck.2016- Fenway Park, Boston - Both glorious nights
2022- Oakland Night 2
2024 Sacramento, CA
Posted by Tom Tomorrow
Hey all,
Well that was quite the launch.
The first glimmerings of this project came to me in Quebec City, Canada in 2013. I had been invited to be part of the Nation magazine's yearly fundraising cruise, which that year went up the East Coast on a fall leaf-season expedition. I was wandering around QC with my family and stopped in a bookstore, where I saw Taschen's huge two volume Midcentury Advertising set. It was too big to carry with me then, but I ordered it as soon as I got home.
Sometime around Feburary 2014, I realized that 2015 was going to constitute the 25th anniversary of This Modern World. The Taschen book was sitting out in my studio and as I was looking at it one day, something clicked and I suddenly knew exactly what I wanted to do.
But I was going to need help. I've been working for a few years with a company called Topatoco, who mostly specialize in helping webcartoonists merchandise their stuff. They're fantastic people, and they have a spinoff company called Make That Thing, which helps usher incompetent people like myself through the Kickstarter process, start to finish. Now, I've had some good t-shirt sales with Topatoco, but I don't think the last compilation we put out together, WORLD OF TOMORROW, did especially well. Nonetheless, when I pitched the idea of a two volume, thousand page hardcover compilation of every TMW cartoon, they shrugged and said, "Sure."
And so last summer we got to work.
A lot of this was on me, obviously—it took me most of last summer just to get all the work organized. All my digital weekly strips are neatly filed and named, so that was easy enough, but I've done a lot of one-offs for people over the years that had weird names and were stuck in some random sub-sub-sub folder on an old backup drive somewhere—you can imagine how much fun I had sorting all of that out! And my work from 1990 through 2000 was pre-digital (a mixture of xerox, pen and ink, and zip-a-tone, these are the originals some of you have pledged to receive), and a significant number of these didn't even have dates on them. So I had to sort them out, make my best guess as to when they ran, mostly by cross-checking with my old books—but I had this dumb habit of trying to sequence the cartoons in those books to emphasize readability rather than chronology, so those were all out of order as well. And then there's the further complication that I would do work for someplace like The Nation in a format to fit their page, and then re-format the cartoon and use it as vacation backup for my weekly syndicated strip, meaning that the same cartoon might have appeared in different places years apart—and there were at least a dozen of these duplicates scattered throughout the book as it began to come together, that I had to track down! I'm still not 100% certain that I got them all.
Anyway it's been a long road with absolutely no certainty that it was ever going to pay off. I spent a lot of time going back and forth with the MTT team on the initial goal to shoot for, because I wanted to cut this thing as close as possible, did not want to risk a failed Kickstarter. The great thing about blowing so far past the initial goal so quickly is that now we've got wiggle room, for unanticipated expenses or cost overruns, which otherwise were simply going to have come out of my pocket. Yep—at $87K, there was still a significant chance this thing was going to cost me money. That's how badly I wanted to make this real.
So this has been a pretty amazing day and a half since we launched, and I thank you all sincerely for embracing this crazy idea I have been working so hard on for so long.
More soon….
Dan
Ok, Dave. Just release the guitar you backed and I'll jump on it...then you can just back a copy of the book. Your wife can thank me.
Unfortunately it's not my guitar as i'm not that crazy but how much would you contribute for a used and signed microphone by this EV (me)? (not the real EV)? HAHA...I can throw that in there!