THIS MODERN WORLD

My first compilation of the Trump era, LIFE IN THE STUPIDVERSE, will be published by IDW in June. You can pre-order it from Amazon here, or from Indiebound here.

Edit: publication of my new book has been pushed back until at least August. :(

Post to be updated as more of these come in …

The best political commentary in America today, and beyond, is found in Tom Tomorrow’s work. Subscribe to SPARKY’S LIST and see it early. I do. You should too. It is so on the money you will be stunned.
—Benmont Tench III (keyboardist for the late Tom Petty)

Sadly, being a prophet is not often profitable. Citizens of the U.S., you can’t say he didn’t warn you about Trump and the GOP again and again… us north-of-the-border types can only laugh or weep or both. SUBSCRIBE, lest ye be stuck with only Breitbart and Fox and Veritas…
—Robert Moriyama

Dan’s the man, since those early pre-Gulf War I days
—@sponson

No one has provided such good political sense for so long as Tom Tomorrow. As a charter SPARKY’S LIST member, I can say how much poorer my life and my understanding would be without his clever, on-the-mark cartoons.
—Jay Gold

Tom Tomorrow’s work is brilliant and biting satire directed at the everyday tragedies and absurdities in the era of Trump. In the tradition of great political cartoonists that restore a sense of sanity and perspective to the afflicted populace. I am forever grateful!
—Anne M.

To sign up for SPARKY’S LIST please click HERE. To find out what SPARKY’S LIST is, keep reading.

As you may have heard, the newspaper industry has been undergoing some difficulties of late. Far too many altweeklies have decided to save literally tens of dollars a week by cutting their most popular features — the comics. Thanks to the internet, my cartoons are more widely read than I could have ever imagined possible, when I started out almost three decades ago. But as my readership expands exponentially, my income continues to decline. I’m no economist, but that doesn’t seem sustainable to me.

The uncertainty of my future was recently compounded by my divorce. For years, I counted on the security of my wife’s income as a way of cushioning the unpredictability of my own; unfortunately this is no longer an operative safety net. I’m still fortunate enough to have a substantial number of clients both in print and online, for which I am profoundly grateful — but the reality is that the world is changing rapidly, I just hit an iceberg in my personal life, and I need to keep figuring out different ways to stay afloat. “How can I help,” you are undoubtedly asking yourself at this moment, perhaps out loud, to the annoyance of your co-workers or the random pedestrians around you.

Well, you can subscribe to SPARKY’S LIST.

“And what is this thing called SPARKY’S LIST,” you would ask, if I were to continue with that particular framing device, which I think I will not. But to answer your imaginary question anyway: it’s a weekly email subscription service, which allows TMW’s most devoted readers the opportunity to get a sneak preview of the cartoon each Sunday, before it goes live the following week, as well as providing the convenience of having it delivered directly to your inbox. If you’re one of those people who can never remember where you left your keys or what day TMW appears on what website, this is the answer for you. About the cartoon, I mean. I can’t help you with your keys.

(It’s like a Patreon, except that I had this system up and running before Patreon ever existed, and have a sizable enough subscriber base now that it’s not worth trying to transfer over.)

For subscribers to SPARKY’S LIST, each week is like that old tv show from the 90s with the cat who brought the newspaper a day early, except instead of tomorrow’s news and stock prices, you’ll be getting a satirical cartoon by Tom Tomorrow. (Also, no cat will be involved in the distribution process.)

But wait, there’s more.

SPARKY’S LIST also features occasional extras, such as short (or sometimes not-so-short) essays to accompany each new cartoon, alternate unpublished drafts of cartoons, contest/giveaways, “classics” from years past, personal photographs, and other bonus content depending on my mercurial whims. But don’t worry, I won’t spam your inbox — these will simply be the sprinkles on the delicious, weekly ice cream sundae that is SPARKY’S LIST.

The cost is $10 for a six month subscription, which, for comparative purposes, is literally less than any common item or experience you can think of that would cost you more than $10!

And in all seriousness, you’ll be helping to support my work and keep TMW alive in an ongoing moment of great uncertainty in my career, my personal life, and in the world at large.

To sign up, click HERE.

Many thanks,

Tom Tomorrow

(PS: apologies to those who don’t want to sign up with a credit card for whatever reason, but I am entirely at the mercy of the interface which allows me to integrate payment processing with the mailing list management software, and for the foreseeable future, other methods of payment like Paypal, personal checks, etc. are not possible.)

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) …