Man in the Middle

In the midst of a burgeoning career and often in the middle of controversies, cartoonist Dan Perkins has a simple message: stand up for the little guy and don't compromise with yahoos
BY JOHN FOX
It was a typical Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Cynical. Opinionated. Sarcastic. Topical. Self-aware. Very funny. And right on the mark.

But the April 9 edition of Tomorrow's "This Modern World" offered something the nationally syndicated strip had rarely if ever tried before: nudity and simulated sex. Which resulted in another typical feature of his work: controversy.

Many of the alternative newspapers that carry "This Modern World," including CityBeat, got heat over the strip. Some reported losing advertisers and distribution points in the aftermath. And one, the Oklahoma Gazette, dropped the strip after its publisher's law practice was threatened with the loss of business from an Oklahoma City area public school district.

Tom Tomorrow -- in real life he's Dan Perkins, a New York-based cartoonist -- publishes the weekly "This Modern World" in about 100 newspapers and magazines nationwide. The strip gets its widest audience through alternative papers such as The Village Voice, San Francisco Bay Guardian and CityBeat, although it's appeared in The Nation, U.S. News & World Report, Spin and Esquire.

Starring Sparky the smart-ass penguin and Biff the bewildered everyman, "This Modern World" riffs on vital issues from gun control to national health care and from welfare reform to corporate media ownership. It might be the most wordy cartoon in existence, as Perkins confesses, but it never fails to entertain, prod, inform and challenge.

The April 9 "This Modern World" was a classic example of Perkins' approach. He decried the American public's obsession with the President Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair while truly important issues like campaign finance reform were regularly ignored by the public and Congress alike.

"For instance," says one of the cartoon's panels, "while journalists rush to report the latest salacious rumors, campaign finance reform has been quietly defeated for another year. ... And Congress knows that no one is paying attention. Sen. Mitch McConnell openly gloats that 'No one in the history of American politics has ever won or lost a campaign on this issue.' "

Instead of the strip's usual cast of characters espousing these views, Perkins had the word balloons coming from a series of Renaissance-era engravings of an orgy scene. The artwork set up a perfect ending joke, which tweaked politicians, readers, the media and even the cartoonist himself: "Unfortunately, these media elitists seem to believe that Americans won't pay attention to anything unless it involves sex."

Falling into the very trap Perkins had set for them, a number of people in Oklahoma City blasted the Gazette for running such depraved work. Claiming that 400-year-old depictions of couples engaging in sex "might teach a girl to try oral sex with another girl," the president of Oklahomans for Children and Families, Bob Anderson, focused his wrath on publisher Bill Bleakley, a lawyer whose clients included the Moore City School Board. If Bleakley's newspaper felt that publishing this cartoon was appropriate behavior, critics charged, how could his law firm be trusted with Oklahoma City's children?

The Gazette dropped "This Modern World" a week later. Bleakley was quoted in the newsletter of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) as saying the strip had been published in his paper on a trial basis only and was "still being considered" for future use.

(Locally, CityBeat received no direct complaints about the April 9 strip. The paper lost several distribution points, however, and Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters was forced to become a media critic on WLW when a talk-show caller told him she thought the strip was pornographic. "Unless a picture is clearly depicting penetration, although it's in incredibly poor taste it isn't illegal," Deters said in response.)

Perkins clearly feels bad about the heat that papers received over the cartoon, but he doesn't know what he could have done differently. He sees himself as "a partner in crime" with the papers that run "This Modern World" -- the crime being bursting the bubbles that prop up America's corporate and political establishment at the expense of the little guy.

"I knew I was pushing the envelope with this particular strip, but I didn't think I broke it," says Perkins at the recent AAN national conference in Washington, D.C. "I've almost never used sexual imagery, and it's not likely to come up again. But if, as an alternative journalist, you're afraid of controversies like this, how far have you moved away from your roots?"

The April controversy helped wrap up an eventful year for Perkins. He won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Cartooning, receiving the prize from Ethel Kennedy at an awards dinner in May. He was unceremoniously dropped from U.S. News & World Report in February after a six-month run. After being courted by The Village Voice, he finally began running in the nation's oldest and best-known alternative paper. He was dropped from Brill's Content before the high-profile media watchdog magazine debuted. And his fourth anthology book, Penguin Soup for the Soul, is due out in September.

As he's gotten more successful and more popular, Perkins, 37, says he's resisted the temptation to tone down his political and social criticism. And, in light of what happened to his strip in Oklahoma City, he's wrestling with avoiding any kind of self-censorship.

"The positive thing that came out of the sex/campaign finance strip is that it reminds me there are small-minded yahoos out there," Perkins says. "I just have to turn back their anger on them. This is what alternative papers should be doing."

Loves Big Boy, Hates Dilbert

At the AAN conference, Perkins is introduced to Ralph Nader after the consumer rights champion finishes speaking to alternative paper editors. Nader seems unfamiliar with "This Modern World."

"Is that some of your cartoon work?," he asks, pointing to Perkins' T-shirt, which features a huge illustration of the Big Boy restaurant mascot.

"No, that's some corporate logo," Perkins replies.

Later, Perkins is bemused by the exchange.

"Here I am meeting one of the counterculture's big heroes and I'm wearing a damn logo on my chest," he says. "Then again, I can't believe Ralph Nader is totally oblivious to Big Boy. Maybe all hope isn't lost after all."

It's actually appropriate that Perkins is caught wearing the Big Boy shirt. "This Modern World" borrows heavily from cultural icons of the past, particularly artwork and advertising images from the 1950s. He says he's obsessed with pop culture and especially enjoys retro logos like Big Boy and the Michelin Man.

"I'm always looking through old books at used book stores for images," he says. "I love old monster movies, old airplanes, old artwork. A recent strip featured Newt Gingrich's head on a character I redrew from a famous Picasso painting of prostitutes. I don't know if many people got that one."

Perkins uses the old images in a collage fashion, tracing over actual photos and placing them beside Sparky, Biff and friends. In the case of the April 9 strip, he found a book on the history of sexual imagery, redrew several images, then cut and pasted them into the final product. Along the way, he cleaned up the graphic illustrations.

"I spent a whole day cutting off penises," he says. "I don't know many people who can say that."

And then there's those words. Hundreds of them are crammed into each four-panel cartoon to explain complicated political issues, subjects that most ordinary Americans avoid at all costs. Aren't cartoons simply supposed to be silly?

"Most people don't care about politics," Perkins admits. "The trick is to articulate issues in a way that makes them pay attention and figure out why they should care. I boil down and distill the essence of complex issues so people can understand them while at the same time trying not to oversimplify things."

It's an approach that requires a deft combination of sarcasm, insight and establishment bashing -- attributes that many people see in the mainstream cartoon Dilbert. Perkins doesn't see it, though.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams masquerades as a defender of the common man, Perkins says, while actually reinforcing the very corporate culture that belittles and downsizes working people. Perkins satirized Adams in "This Modern World" by getting hold of a Xerox employee manual that used Dilbert characters -- the rights to which Adams certainly sold -- to poke fun of the concept of a company manual while simultaneously urging employees to get with the program.

"Dilbert is fine as a Blondie-style cartoon," Perkins says. "You know: 'Aren't bosses dumb? Aren't offices wacky?' I don't think Adams is as smart as he thinks he is. It's a fresh take on Dagwood Bumstead, but that's as far as it goes."

Perkins thinks the subliminal corporate apologies in Dilbert just reinforce people's desires to avoid thinking about big issues. And they make his job even harder.

"Listen, capitalism doesn't need more defenders," he says. "It's fine. What needs help is democracy. The victims of capitalism need defending every now and then -- the people who lose their jobs and are denied health care. Not everything has a bottom line."

Rolling With the Punches

This week sees the premiere issue of the high-profile media criticism magazine Brill's Content. Run by former Court TV founder Steven Brill, the publication calls itself "an independent voice that tries to cover the media the way the media purports to cover everyone else."

One of its media savvy features was to be a six-panel version of "This Modern World" created especially for the monthly magazine. That is, until Brill himself objected to Perkins' first submission, a strip contemplating how media coverage tends to be biased neither to the right nor to the left but squarely toward the interests of media owners.

Brill's Content debuts without Tom Tomorrow.

It's yet another bewildering though instructive foray for Perkins into the strange world of mainstream journalism. Publication after publication has approached him with hopes that the hip, cynical edge of "This Modern World" will attract the desired Generation X demographic -- only to realize later that the cartoon savages the very corporate-owned media machine to which they're wed. And they can't have that, can they?

"These publications know my body of work when they hire me," Perkins says. "They want something edgy, but then maybe they hope I won't be too edgy. I've never hidden what I am."

What he is has been honed a bit recently through two big breaks. The first came in 1996 when The Village Voice parted ways acrimoniously with its longtime cartoonist, Jules Feiffer. To any young cartoonist interested in alternative newspapers, Feiffer was a god. And to anyone interested in alternative journalism, The Voice was the Holy Grail.

Perkins says he was on the telephone telling his girlfriend about Feiffer's departure when call-waiting clicked in. It was someone from The Voice asking if he would be interested in running "This Modern World" in Feiffer's old space.

"I'm telling her that I don't envy the person The Voice picks to replace Feiffer," Perkins says, "and on the other line is a Voice editor saying they want me to do it."

In deference to Feiffer, who had become a friend and who left The Voice after a bitter disagreement, Perkins turned down the opportunity.

Perkins says Feiffer called him to thank him for the loyalty but to say, in essence, look out for your own interests.

"He said I should wait a few months and call The Voice back," Perkins says. "It was more like a year. I called them one day and said, 'Let's go.' "

"This Modern World" began running weekly in The Village Voice earlier this year.

The second was when both Time and U.S. News & World Report came knocking in mid-1997. Time wanted to fill a small space with a rotation of several alternative cartoonists. U.S. News offered a weekly gig with space for a normal four-panel "This Modern World."

Perkins went with U.S. News, both for space reasons and for the opportunity to work with editor James Fallows, whose work Perkins respected a great deal. Things went fine until, six months later, an apologetic Fallows told him the magazine was dropping the strip.

"I found out from someone high up that (U.S. News publisher) Mort Zuckerman didn't like my politics," Perkins says. "He told Fallows to get rid of me, so I was dropped."

Ironically, he says, he might have been better off going with Time -- which has long since filled its cartoon needs -- because the magazine's owner, media behemoth Time Warner, probably wouldn't meddle in one of its publications the way Zuckerman did.

"I'd always wanted to be a cartoonist when I was growing up," Perkins says when asked to contemplate his current place in the world. "Fifteen years ago, my idea was to live on $12,000 a year, which would mean getting run in 10-15 papers at $100 a month. I'm now in 100 papers and the occasional national magazine. No one is more surprised than me."

Flirting With Fame

A few months ago, Perkins was invited to attend the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. A little nervous that his Clinton bashing in "This Modern World" might be thrown back in his face, he instead was pleased to meet several members of Clinton's speech-writing staff who claimed to be fans of his work.

Later in the evening Perkins met Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury, perhaps an early role model for Perkins' brand of anti-establishment social commentary. Did they talk about common themes, and did he pick Trudeau's brain on how social critics can remain true to their roots?

"He blew me off," Perkins says. "He's too famous. Famous people are a pain in the ass. They don't want to talk to you if you're not on their level of fame. I also met Al Franken, a guy I'd think would be into my leftist rants about capitalism and democracy. He brushed me off too. I mean, who's Al Franken?"

Saying the whole White House experience was "fun but annoying," Perkins is wary of becoming too well-known. He likes the exposure of being in 100 newspapers and magazines, but his experiences with U.S. News and Brill's Content remind him to stay grounded in his beliefs and not to compromise or sell out.

Besides, he says, he's not very prolific.

"I can't just churn out cartoons every day," Perkins says. "I don't want to burn out. I'd rather hoard my good ideas and keep them with the alternative press, where I have a better chance of being appreciated. Besides, I like approaching readers from the bottom and from the underground rather than from the mainstream."

The controversy surrounding his April 9 strip remains with him today and likely will for a long time. In the end, he says, it's been a worthwhile though stressful experience.

"That controversy reminds you not to reach consensus with yahoos the way the Oklahoma City publisher apparently did," Perkins says. "Yahoos are wrong. Don't compromise with them. Freedom of speech isn't a part-time job." ©

CityBeat, Vol. 4, Issue 30; June 18-24, 1998