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Fade to Black Presents:
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With its incredible insight, humor and observations, "This Modern World" by Tom Tomorrow is one of those truly rare creations which can make you see the other side of the coin regardless of your political biases. And when it comes to comic strips which expose the flaws of mainstream media, politics and pop culture, no other cartoon does it better. What started out as a small comic strip carried only in alternative publications is now carried in over one hundred magazines and newspapers, (although still mostly alternative). However, the comic strip recently has begun to cross over into 'mainstream' publications, which of course, has not been without friction. In February of 1998, after a six month run, U.S. News & World Report dropped Tom Tomorrow's cartoon. This due most likely to the fact that U.S. News' publisher Mort Zuckerman disagreed with the cartoon's politics. He was also dropped by the always opportunistic Brill's Content before the magazine even hit the shelves after Steve Brill personally objected to a cartoon that suggested media's kowtowing to the their owners. The shove from alternative to mainstream many times has a familiar outcome. A publications approaches in order to attract the mythological 'edgy cynically-hip', 'Generation-X' reader, only to find that the cartoon is so edgy that it points out the hypocrisy of the corporate media machine. The message from mainstream publications being; we want something edgy and truthful, but not that truthful. We contacted Tom Tomorrow (a.k.a. Dan Perkins) a few weeks after he won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "This Modern World", and talked to him about the media, the Internet, humor and creativity.
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