Winner of the 2013 Herblock award; 2015 Society of Illustrators Silver Medal recipient; 2015 first place AAN award for cartooning; 2015 Pulitzer finalist.

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Going to try to start updating the old blog again, if only with links to each week’s new toon!

The latest: another week in hell.

(This is the additional commentary sent out with yesterday’s SPARKY’S LIST mailing):

Okay, I say this every week, but man it is impossible to keep up lately. I rewrote this one late in the week to include the reference to the pipe bomber, and then rewrote what I had already rewritten to include the synagogue shooting. And there was a third incident this week, when a racist gun nut shot two African Americans at random in a grocery store, that I didn’t even have room to include.

This was a genuinely terrible week in America. It seems like everything I’ve been watching, thinking about, writing about for a quarter century is all coming together in some perfect storm of awfulness, and I don’t know how we claw our way out of this. We better hope Democrats at least take back the House in a couple of weeks, because I don’t know what this country is going to look like in two years if they don’t. No, that’s not quite right — I have a good sense of it, and it’s not pretty.

There’s a famous line, often misattributed to Sinclair Lewis: “when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” What I didn’t quite see coming is that it would literally embrace the symbols and antisemitism of Nazi Germany. The President of the United States now openly calls himself a “nationalist” and denounces “globalists.” I don’t know if he’s even smart enough to understand what he’s saying, or if that weasel Stephen Miller is just whispering sweet nothings in his ear that he then waddles up to the podium to repeat because he likes the sound of them, but the effect is the same either way. The worst people in the country now feel revved up and empowered. Deranged, hate-filled lunatics go on YouTube and find out how to construct pipe bombs. Gun nuts with their precious AK-47s decide to strike a blow against an imaginary Jewish conspiracy (to overrun the country with scary dark-skinned foreign invaders), and gun down a bunch of senior citizens gathered to celebrate a young child’s rite of passage. Trump didn’t create the conditions and the hatreds which made the events of this last week possible, but he sure as hell stokes the fire and basks in its warmth.

Wish I had a more positive note to end on, but I’m just worn out by all of it.

(This was, admittedly, not the most uplifting essay I have ever sent out to the list…)

I forgot to feed the website again.

I’m gonna try to start posting cartoons here again, at the end of the week (after my valued paying clients have already run them) …

My cover for the Italian comics magazine, Linus.

I’ll be in Italy for the second half of September to promote the crowdfunded Italian compilation, “Il Pazzo Mondo a Stelle e Strisce” (which I think translates roughly as “The Crazy World of Stars and Stripes”). This is the itinerary that I have so far; I will update this as I get more information.

Sept. 16-17: Lector in Fabula cultural festival, Conversano.

Sept. 19, 7 pm: Discussion at Giufà bookshop, near Termini station, via degli Aurunci 38

Sept. 22-24: Dialoghi di Trani festival, Trani.

Sept. 29-30: Internazionale festival, Ferrara.

* * *

And then on the afternoon of Oct. 21, I’ll be giving a presentation at the Witching Hour Festival in my hometown of Iowa City. The event is at the Englert Theatre, which was the movie palace of my childhood, back when movie theaters would run old school animated shorts before the main feature. I spent countless hours at the Englert as a kid, and have been wanting to do an event there since it became a live performance venue, so I’m especially looking forward to this one.

If you missed out on the big Kickstarter compilation, comics publisher IDW has just put out a second edition. (If your local indy bookstore has it in stock, please buy it there, but if not you can buy it through the link below and I get a few bucks as an Amazon affiliate in addition to my royalty.)

This is an expanded edition, with some additional pages of Trump material (up through the election, basically). If you backed the original Kickstarter (at book level or higher) and would like to buy a copy of this edition, email me (tomtomorrow-at-gmail) and I’ll give you a code good for a discount.

I did an interview last week with Patrick Freyne of the Irish Times, ahead of my talk at the Galway Arts Festival in a couple of weeks. The article is here.

Somebody mentioned to me recently that my Wikipedia entry is not exactly up-to-date and boy were they right — judging from my Wiki page, my career stopped in 2009 and before that mostly consisted of some deals that fell through. My understanding is that it’s poor form to edit your own entry, but if anyone wants to take it on, in whole or part, here’s a (not so) short list of omissions and errors:

(UPDATE: continues below the fold. Many of these suggestions have been incorporated; the ones that haven’t are marked in boldface.)

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