Before he became Tom Tomorrow, political cartoonist Dan Perkins was a Zephyr employee making zines in Iowa City

This Modern World, the long-running, award-winning satirical comic that Dan Perkins publishes under the pen name Tom Tomorrow, came to life in Iowa City during the mid-’80s. Perkins first began sketching the strip while working at a downtown copy shop, though his passion for cartooning developed much earlier when his parents first moved to Iowa City in 1966.

“When I was around 6 years old, I was very into Peanuts, and then I started getting into Mad Magazine,” Perkins said. “My dad would take me to the university’s library, which had a pretty good comic section, and I would check out these collections of Mad Magazine. Or I was checking out Charles Addams’ collections when I was 7 or 8, because I loved all the comics.”

After his parents divorced, Perkins moved around with his mother for several years until they resettled in Iowa City when he was a teenager. By the time he graduated from West High in 1979, he had become an underground comics aficionado.

“My path into comics was largely the underground comics — you know, Robert Crumb, Zap Comics, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, that sort of thing,” Perkins recalled. “Those were made possible because every town had a head shop that sold bongs or whatever, and the head shops all carried underground comics.”

While working as a teenaged doorman at The Iowa Theater, a defunct cinema that was located on Dubuque Street, he befriended a projectionist who shared his passion for comics. Later in the evenings when the last film was running, the two were the only ones left working and would stay up talking, which turned Perkins on to a lot of cool stuff.

“I did a year at the University [of Iowa],” he said, “and then I was just an impatient young man who wanted to see the world. My friend the projectionist had moved to New York City with a couple of his friends, and I decided I was going to do that also. So, I moved there at the age of 19 or 20 with maybe $500 to my name, and I worked a bunch of random jobs, including a short-lived competitor of The Comics Journal named The Comics Times. I did paste-up and went to Marvel press conferences, which was great, but then the magazine folded.”

Perkins moved back to Iowa City and made a half-assed attempt at going back to school before landing an awful job printing blueprints while breathing ammonia in the basement of Plaza Centre One. Work life improved a bit after landing a job at Zephyr Copies.

“That copy shop was the hub, with the entire fucking city coming in to make copies,” he said. “In terms of cartooning, I remember being pretty starstruck when Berkeley Breathed would bring in his originals to copy before sending them out to his syndicate.”

Perkins had grown more serious about cartooning, and was attempting to work in a more traditional style with pen and ink on Bristol board. The goal was to get his work into newspapers via syndication — like Breathed’s Bloom County — but Perkins felt that he was just being imitative, and so he forged his own path into the unknown.

“I’d also be at Zephyr late running the machines with a lot of downtime,” Perkins said, “which gave me time to work on my own zines and the collage-based comics that were the predecessors to what I do today. I also used to play with image degradation. Like, I’d take a self-portrait and make a copy of the copy dozens of times until the image was completely abstracted and strange. I guess I can admit however-many decades later that I may have abused my privileges as a copy shop employee to print those up.”

“By this point, I had really grown fascinated with collage,” he continued. “I loved those old mid-century advertising images. The one moment that profoundly changed everything was finding a stack of cheap old ’40s and ’50s Life magazines in an antique store. I bought them, took them home, and immediately started cutting things out and creating these collages from the images, then started messing around with them on the copier.”

This eventually led Perkins to the aesthetic that he developed for This Modern World, because a lot of the strip’s stock characters had roots in those midcentury Life magazines. During those long nights at Zephyrs, he started thinking, I’m really interested in collage, and I’m really interested in comics — how can I combine these two?

“I played around with that idea in various ways,” Perkins said, “so I did another zine, which was maybe a 16-page story that was basically an extended satire of consumerism and technophilia. And then from there, I started developing it into a weekly cartoon, because alt-weeklies were starting to pop up everywhere.”

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, most cities in America had alternative weekly newspapers that served as community bulletin boards in that pre-internet era. The majority of those weeklies have since disappeared like dust in the wind, starting with the Iowa City ICON, which folded at the turn of the century. This was followed by dozens of other closures over the next two decades, including the mother of all alt-weeklies, The Village Voice, which ceased publishing its print edition in 2017 and stopped publishing altogether the following year. Today, only a handful of publications across America continue to carry the torch, including Little Village.

“With few very rare exceptions, there was no way you were going to directly get your work into a daily newspaper,” Perkins said. “But the alt-weeklies were open to most anything. Like, someone at a paper would be opening the mail and say, ‘Oh, this is good. Let’s run this.’ You could approach them directly, and I was able to self-syndicate my work and have it run in a lot of those papers nationally.”

The San Diego Reader was the first to run This Modern World in 1987, and Perkins’ reach expanded after he got his hands on the Association of Alternative News Weeklies’ mailing list. Stuffing envelopes with his comic strips and sending them out across the land became a monthly ritual, and the number of media outlets that published the strip continued to snowball. When his syndications dipped in 2009 as an effect of the financial crisis, Perkins’ friend Eddie Vedder tapped him to design the cover art for Pearl Jam’s album Backspacer.  

“I was very lucky that I was able to establish an audience by running in those papers for so long,” Perkins said. “And as the ground shifted under me, and everything started changing, I just had to adapt. A big part of my income now is my own subscription newsletter that I send out, and that’s a lot of what helps keep me afloat. You could say that I was a counterintuitively decent businessman, at least for an artist.” 

Over the years, Perkins has anthologized his This Modern World strips in 14 books that have followed a similar publishing trajectory. The first collection, Greetings From This Modern World, was published in 1992 by St. Martin’s Griffin. Fast-forward a few decades and Perkins is doing it himself again with his most recent Kickstarter-backed anthology that spans 2020 to 2025 — the appropriately-titled Our Long National Nightmare — which blew away its $30,000 goal by more than $100K. Fans can also receive This Modern World for as little as $2 a month by subscribing to his weekly newsletter, and it continues to appear in a handful of print publications, including the one you hold in your hands. 

“I fucking love that I still have a tangible connection to Iowa City, because it still runs in Little Village,” Perkins said. “My father passed away four years ago, so I don’t have an excuse to get back there like I used to. But I always liked Iowa City. It’s so full of memories. When I do make it back, I always love walking around and revisiting old haunts. So, as long as my strip is running, I feel like I still have a thread of a connection to this town, which is really important.”

Other Iowa cartoonists

Here are just a handful of the award-winning satirical artists who have called Iowa home. By Genevieve Trainor

Ding Darling (1876-1962) moved with his family from Michigan to Sioux City, Iowa at age 10, starting his newspaper career in 1900 at the Sioux City Journal as a reporter. He began publishing political cartoons six years later at the Des Moines Register and Leader. Darling spent the bulk of his career at the New York Herald Tribune, which published his work from 1917-1949, including his two Pulitzer Prize winners (1924, 1943). He left New York in 1919, however, creating his cartoons at his home in Des Moines.

Paul Conrad (1924-2010), born in Cedar Rapids and raised in Des Moines, got his start in editorial cartooning at the Daily Iowan while studying art at the University of Iowa. He worked for three decades as chief editorial cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times, snagging three Pulitzer Prizes for his work (1964, 1971, 1984) as well as a spot on Richard Nixon’s Enemies List.

Frank Miller (1925-1983) may have “only” taken home a single Pulitzer during his three decades of political cartooning for the Des Moines Register, but the winning piece packed a big punch. “I said—” calls one tiny figure on the precipice of a blasted world to another across a chasm, “We sure settled that dispute, didn’t we!” The unsettling commentary on nuclear arms won in 1963.

Sam Locke Ward hasn’t won a Pulitzer (yet), but Little Village’s own long-time political cartoonist has impressed the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, snagging their top cartooning award in 2020 for his comic Futile Wrath. The fact that the fiercely independent DIY musician and zine-maker has maintained his collaboration with LV for so long is its own kind of award, if you ask us!

Berkeley Breathed (b. 1957) only lived in Iowa City a few years (his then-girlfriend attended the University of Iowa College of Law), but the locale left an indelible mark on his long-running strip Bloom County, which won a Pulitzer in 1987. The boarding house where many of his characters lived at times was based on the Lindsay House on College Street.

Related event:

Little Village Fundraiser: 25 Years of Political Madness and Print Media with Dan Perkins, Saturday, Jan. 24, 7 p.m., Kindred Coffee, Iowa City

This article is from Little Village’s December 2025 Peak Iowa issue, a collection of stories drawn from Hawkeye State history, culture and legend. Browse dozens of Peak Iowa tales here.