I know it’s already old news, but if you haven’t heard, Tom Tomorrow, the famous cartoonist of the “This Modern World” syndicated strip, came to speak at Ithaca College, thanks again to the Park Center for Independent Media.
Lacking the necessary hand-eye-brain-imagination coordination for drawing, I don’t have a huge interest in comics and visual art, but I was fascinated by Tom Tomorrow (formerly, of course, Dan Perkins) and the way he uses comics as a form of media criticism. Yes, he does the political cartoons about politics in general, but more specifically, he focuses on the incredulous content broadcast all over corporate TV “news” – the stations that give airtime and serious consideration to whether Obama is a Muslim, the stations that mocked those who spoke out against the Iraq War, and the stations that in general sensationalize their reporting.
More interestingly, I loved seeing Dan’s favorite news sources and listening to him speak about where he goes for his own news and inspiration. All of the sources he uses for actual news-gathering are the same indy media publications we’ve read about and studied in class – HuffPost, TPM, FAIR, A Tiny Revolution, Glenn Greenwald. It’s an example of the elite news packagers learning from the elite news producers. Tom Tomorrow just packages his with some color and cartoon penguins.
Lacking the necessary hand-eye-brain-imagination coordination for drawing, I don’t have a huge interest in comics and visual art, but I was fascinated by Tom Tomorrow (formerly, of course, Dan Perkins) and the way he uses comics as a form of media criticism. Yes, he does the political cartoons about politics in general, but more specifically, he focuses on the incredulous content broadcast all over corporate TV “news” – the stations that give airtime and serious consideration to whether Obama is a Muslim, the stations that mocked those who spoke out against the Iraq War, and the stations that in general sensationalize their reporting.
More interestingly, I loved seeing Dan’s favorite news sources and listening to him speak about where he goes for his own news and inspiration. All of the sources he uses for actual news-gathering are the same indy media publications we’ve read about and studied in class – HuffPost, TPM, FAIR, A Tiny Revolution, Glenn Greenwald. It’s an example of the elite news packagers learning from the elite news producers. Tom Tomorrow just packages his with some color and cartoon penguins.
