THIS MODERN WORLD

Michael Cavna at the Washington Post says I may be the biggest Pulitzer outlier (for cartooning, at least) in decades.

SOMETIMES, however rarely, the outlier manages to gain an inside track. And perhaps no first-time Pulitzer finalist has ever been more of an outlier than Dan Perkins …

In honoring editorial cartooning, the Pulitzer Prize Board has historically been a tradition-bound group. To the degree that whenever a name bobs up from beyond the mainstream, it feels like a breakthrough. In the category’s nine-decade past, in fact, you can count on two hands the number of winners who weren’t closely affiliated with a single mainstream newspaper, typically as a full-time staffer.

The rest.

The metaphorical awards shelf here in the expansive world headquarters of Tomorrowco Industries has grown happily crowded over the years — the Pulitzer nod, the Herblock, a couple of RFKs, the Aaronsen, the Society of Illustrators medal, and a few others. But the first award I ever won for my art was on Earth Day, 1970, at Roosevelt Elementary School in Iowa City, Iowa. All the kids submitted designs for an Earth Day button, which would be copied off and distributed to the class. Mine won, mainly because it was the most colorful, but this was back before color xerox, let alone laser printers, and I remember wondering how the teachers were going to reproduce it without losing the vibrancy of the art. Since the teachers at Roosevelt Elementary School did not, in fact, have access to four-color printing technology, they traced it and ran it off on the school mimeograph ditto machine, and I can still remember the bitter disappointment of seeing my bright, colorful design reduced down to smudgy blue ink. It was my first taste of every print artist’s lifelong struggle with the tension between idea and execution, between original concept and reproduction technology. It’s a battle I’m still fighting 45 years later, every time I put out a book or anything else on dead tree media.

Pulitzer finalist. I really did not see that one coming.

Update: Meteor Blades at Daily Kos wrote a nice post about it here. And: Walter Ryce from the Monterey County Weekly gives it a mention here.

Sparky’s List is now completely disentangled from Amazon Payments. You should not receive any further notices from Amazon regarding your subscription, but in the off chance that there’s some glitch somewhere and you get one–IGNORE IT. My Amazon Payments account has been completely deleted.

From now on, payments will be processed by Stripe.com by way of CampaignZee, a third party integration app that allows Mailchimp and Stripe to talk to one another, so that you are added to the list automatically when you sign up, and sent reminders automatically if your credit card payment fails. (Think of CampaignZee as my office assistant, handling the administrative details so I can focus on cartooning.) This should be a huge improvement over Mailchimp’s previous built-in integration with Amazon Payments, which, as many of you know, was a total mess.

Current subscriptions will not be affected until renewal time. If you have four months left, you’ll be on the List for another four months. But at some point between now and then, you need to upgrade your subscription information — just follow the link in the latest newsletter.

New subscribers can sign up here.

(If you don’t know what Sparky’s List is, read this.)

–The Alt Weekly Comics show at Society of Illustrators runs through May. More details here and here.

–Here’s a video of me talking about writing cartoons, shot by my friends at Monterey County Weekly a few weeks ago.

–The accompanying print interview.