On Friday morning, the National Press Foundation announced Dan Perkins is this year’s winner of the Berryman Award for Editorial Cartoons.
The name Dan Perkins may not instantly ring a bell, but Little Village readers definitely know his work. For almost 40 years, Perkins has been writing and drawing This Modern World using his pen name Tom Tomorrow. His comics have been gracing the pages of LV since its very first issue in 2001.
“Tom Tomorrow’s sharp and iconic work embodies the higher purpose of political cartooning: holding powerful figures to account using satire grounded in good journalism,” the Berryman Award judges said.
Dan Perkins spent much of his childhood and adolescence in Iowa City, graduating from West High School. He developed his cartooning sensibilities as part of Iowa City’s vibrant zine scene in the early 1980s.
“In the years before the internet, artists, outsiders and other weirdos connected with each other through a snail-mail social network that flowed with photocopied zines,” LV’s Kembrew McLeod wrote in a 2019 story about that burst of creativity in Iowa City.
“These new printing tools, combined with punk rock’s do-it-yourself attitude” were the milieu that fed the zine creators, McLeod explained.. “… The local hub of activity was Zephyr Copies, where cartoonist Dan Perkins worked in the 1980s before launching his long-running strip This Modern World under the pen name Tom Tomorrow.”
Perkins created This Modern World in 1988, four years after he moved to San Francisco. It first appeared in Processed World, an underground magazine focused on the absurd and oppressive nature of office life in what was then-known as “the Information Age companies” of the Bay Area. The strip quickly gained a following, and by the early ’90s it was appearing in alt-weekly newspapers around the country, and even a few mainstream publications.
The Berryman Award was established in 1989 to honor the memory of Clifford Berryman and his son James, both of whom were Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonists. It not the first honor Perkins has won. He’s also received the Herblock Award for Editorial Cartooning (named for the legendary Washington Post cartoonish) and the James Madison Freedom of Information Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, among other honors, and received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Journalism twice for This Modern World.
Tom Tomorrow and This Modern World can be found in every print issue of Little Village, including the most recent.
