At the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists in Washington, D.C. in 2012, Dan Perkins
appears with Sparky the Penguin, his avatar and a leading character in his cartoon This Modern World.
The Pulitzer Prize committee
has announced that Dan Perkins, whose brilliant cartoon "This Modern World" with its often serrated humor appears Mondays at Daily Kos, is a finalist in this year's Editorial Cartooning category. It's a belated honor for Perkins, who began the cartoon 25 years ago in the
Processed World, a magazine about the digital age from the standpoint of office workers. It was later picked up by alternative weeklies such as the
San Diego Reader and the
SF Weekly. It has since been syndicated in scores of newspapers.
The other finalist this year is Kevin Kallaugher of the Baltimore Sun. The Pulitzer winner is Adam Zyglis, the staff editorial cartoonist for The Buffalo News.
In its notice, the committee said Perkins's cartoons "create an alternate universe—an America frozen in time whose chorus of conventional wisdom is at odds with current reality."
Perkins is also responsible for putting together the Daily Kos comics page. Of the news, Markos Moulitsas said:
"Dan is one of my favorite people in politics, a legend in the alt-cartooning world and a survivor at a time when his medium has been decimated by the collapse of the alternative weekly newspaper industry. This honor is well deserved."
Perkins also received the 2013 Herblock award and the 2015 Society of Illustrators Silver Medal.
Please head below the fold for more on the talented cartoonist.
Not so long ago, hundreds of newspapers had a staff political cartoonist and provided a venue for several syndicated cartoonists each day. Sadly, far fewer do so today and every year a few more stop publishing editorial cartoons entirely. That's a big problem when cartooning is your livelihood. In 2013, Perkins established Sparky's List that lets fans pay for a cartoon delivered to their email inbox the week before it publishes elsewhere.
In a recent interview with the Monterey County Weekly, Mary Duan wrote:
Perkins’ cartoons, back in the day, started out as satire on consumerism and technology. He based his characters—blustery, dim-witted conservatives—on old advertising images. It was natural, he said in an interview a few years back, to segue into political cartooning. “Politics, like advertising,” he said, “is about people selling you things you didn’t really want or need.” [...]
Any paper’s demise, he writes on his website, is a small reminder of the fragility of the ecosystem that sustains his work. And that work, week after week, year after year, is hard. “It feels like I’m reinventing the wheel every fucking week,” he says. “I’ve never gotten this down where it’s a routine.” [...]
[DUAN:] You’ve said before, satire has been transformed into simple statement of fact, that as it turns out, there are a lot of people out there who don’t pay attention to anything unless it involves sex. What makes good satire now?
[PERKINS:] I think how it’s progressed for me over the years. In the early ’90s I was often writing about things I genuinely thought the audience might not have heard of, and I saw it as a vehicle for information. Now I don’t have to explain things quite as much, although it’s surprising how many people haven’t heard of Google. I’m freed up a little bit. The purpose of the cartoon started to diminish with the rise of blogs and when everyone is talking about something, it becomes a matter of trying to capture the right moment in a way that resonates more than standing on your soapbox and shouting.