TMW25 feedback

One of the drawbacks of the digital age is that you no longer get physical letters to save as mementos (like the postcard from Kurt Vonnegut that I have hanging on my dining room wall). Nonetheless, I just got a very nice note from my friend John Sayles about the 25 year compilation, and he gave me permission to post part of it here.

I always feel like culture is a very crowded conversation, and that without stuff like Tom Tomorrow there would be only two voices heard- right-wing dingbats and liberal apologists for the fucked-up status quo. In filmmaking post-production we do a sound mix, in which a technician uses band-pass filters to separate signal from noise, allowing unintelligible street dialogue to make sudden sense. This is the service I think you’ve been providing for so long. Though satire rarely ‘changes’ things right away, it is needed to keep the sepsis from spreading- the fall of the Soviet Union was not caused by the CIA but because they kept lying to themselves till the cynicism- and real despair- among the people left nothing to prop the rotting edifice up.

Anyhow, the strips are a pleasure to look at (I love all the marginalia) and really funny and appropriately critical of an American public that can make anything but a bad joke out of Donald Trump. I’m always struck in Britain how clever and snarky the humor is without ever being for something (caring, of course, leaves you vulnerable to either counter-attack or just being thought hopelessly uncool) and have always valued the humanist core running through your work. Hope you continue to whack away at it, and when you finally decide to hang up your digital art tools, I look forward to Sparky Died for Your Sins (most likely barbecued and served on toothpicks at the Washington Press Corps gala) when the remainder of your strips are collected.