Tomorrow's news, today!

The man behind the masked penguin explains what turned him into an avidly political cartoonist, and the "inherent optimism" behind those blistering comic strips.

By Suzy Hansen

Aug 14, 2003 | "Who is Tom Tomorrow? It is a question that keeps the public awake at night, tossing and turning throughout the long, restless predawn hours ..." So says Tom Tomorrow, anyway, in the amusing, personal foreword to his new book "The Great Big Book of Tomorrow," an expansive collection of his popular "This Modern World" cartoons. Many of the thousands of Tomorrow fans (and antagonizers) surely have wondered, though, about the man behind the acerbic political and social commentary, the often hilarious takedowns of our venerated leaders and, of course, that masked penguin.

Curious readers won't be disappointed: In "The Great Big Book of Tomorrow" we even get a picture of the author's real dog. More importantly, the book is a cohesive, play-by-play of the last two decades' most consuming controversies broken down and shaken up, typically, into four or six cartoon panels, often featuring those familiar 1950s-retro caricatures. What also distinguishes "This Modern World" from many other cartoons is that they tend to be text-heavy; as "Tom Tomorrow" explained to Salon in a recent interview, he's happy to take on and dissect the finer points of healthcare plans and trade agreements, not to mention the Bush administration's increasingly confusing motives for attacking Iraq.

So who is he? Dan Perkins, 42, and a native of Kansas, Detroit and Iowa (he lived in all three before he was 5), first published a serialized version of "This Modern World" in a small magazine while living in San Francisco in the early 1980s. He now lives in Brooklyn and his comic runs in over 100 publications, including Salon. Perkins also maintains his own blog. Recently, he spoke to Salon by phone from his home about being a cartoonist during the Clinton administration vs. the Bush years, why the dead hover over his every comic and why he's never written a positive cartoon.

You note in the book that your work became more overtly political during the first Gulf War. But what specifically motivated you?

It became explicitly political during the first Gulf War when I was really frustrated that I didn't have an outlet. Then, suddenly, the little cartoon light bulb went off over my head and I thought, "Oh, I do in fact have a soapbox" and started using it.

Do you remember a turning point?

After one of the big protest marches in San Francisco when there were hundreds of thousands of people marching, it rated about five seconds on the evening news. They immediately cut to a group of half dozen, what in 2003 we would call, Free Republic types, who were protesting in favor of the war. And I just thought, "That's equal time? That's extraordinary!"

There's a great follow-up to this: The local news anchor, who really used to annoy me quite a lot, was meeting with a friend of mine who worked with Project Censored. They got to talking about media bias and the news anchor pulled out his wallet, pulled out a folded up clipping of one of my cartoons and said, "You wanna know who's biased? This guy is biased!" I thought that was wonderful; of course I am biased. It's his job not to be biased but it's equally my job to be completely biased. I get that periodically as a cartoonist -- the angry accusation that I'm biased. It's sort of like saying, "The sun is very bright!" Or, "Air keeps us alive."

Next Page: "Feedback is not an unmixed blessing"

• View blog reactions