If the job of a political cartoonist is to make enemies and provoke outrage, Dan Perkins had a banner year in '98. In the space of four months, his comic strip "This Modern World" was dropped by two publications (including U.S. News & World Report) and passed over by another after ruffling the feathers of publishers and readers alike.
But don't expect to see Perkins in the unemployment line any time soon. Despite his knack for biting the hand that feeds, he is doing just fine, thank you. His syndicated strip -- credited to his alter ego, Tom Tomorrow -- appears weekly in the Village Voice and more than 100 other alternative papers; he has a development deal with "Saturday Night Live" and the fourth collection of his work has hit the bookstores.
It may not reach the kind of mass audience enjoyed by other strips, but "This Modern World" (which appeared in the Los Angeles Reader for years until the paper was bought out by New Times in 1996) has gained a reputation as one of the most clever and incisive political cartoons in the country. With a novel '50s-style artistic conceit and an intrepid penguin named Sparky, Perkins gleefully skewers the hypocrisies of late 20th century society, attacking everything from corporate duplicity to political deception to media doublespeak.
"He is able to use the actual words and actions of people but show them for the complete absurdity that they are," says Art Winslow, literary editor of the Nation, which has run many of Perkins' strips over the years.
The cartoonist's ironic deconstruction of American culture earned him the coveted Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in '98 and has drawn accolades from the likes of Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who has trumpeted Tom Tomorrow as "the wry voice of American common sense, humor and decency." But despite his devoted following and well-credentialed fans, Perkins' notoriety has left him wary.
"I have a deeply ambivalent relationship with mainstream 'successes,' " he said recently, on the phone from San Francisco, where he was moderating a book festival panel on press censorship and promoting his latest volume, "Penguin Soup for the Soul" (St. Martin's).
"They say they want something edgy, so they pluck me out and use me for a while, but then they say, 'Oh, could you not be so edgy?' and then we run into trouble and it all sort of falls apart."
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