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"I’m just lucky that I have a cartoon, so that when I’m foaming at the mouth, it channels out into my work..."
tom tomorrow's modern world
smokebox interviews dan perkins -- part 2
(part one)
Smokebox: Things got so weird and outrageous during the Clinton years, it turned me into a "former " political junkie who just can’t stand to watch the news any more. But I decided recently, "Well, I’m going to be talking to Tom Tomorrow, I’d better see what’s on the news," so I turned on the Jim Lehrer News Hour, and they were doing a piece on the Bush energy plan. It was just unbelievable–they had this PR woman from the nuclear industry and an executive from a nuclear utility, and she was just cooing gently about how safe nuclear power is now, and he was drawling on about how we want progress, and how we don’t want "a nation of Californias," and it was enough to have me still foaming at the mouth now.
Tomorrow: Unfortunately, you rarely get the anti-corporate perspective on a show like that, so it will make you foam at the mouth. I’m just lucky that I have a cartoon, so that when I’m foaming at the mouth, it channels out into my work.
Smokebox: For a while there, it seemed that I couldn’t go anywhere without encountering a stuffed Dilbert doll, or a Dogbert doll…so far I haven’t noticed that sort of marketing thing with Sparky, or Blinky the Extremely Nice Dog, or, God help me, Manny the Millipede. Have you been approached—
Tomorrow: [roaring with laughter] Manny the Millipede? I forgot about him! He was just in that one cartoon!
Smokebox: Well, I didn’t forget!
Tomorrow: [still laughing] I completely forgot about Manny the Millipede…you have to understand, with the hard drive of my brain, I pretty much purge these things as soon as I do them and I’m immediately on to the next one; I just don’t have the storage space!
Smokebox: Have you been approached by marketers who would love to see a Sparky in every household?
Tomorrow: Of course not, my stuff is in no way marketable. I’ve got a partnership with the guy who does my animation [Harold Moss], and we’ve talked periodically about doing that stuff ourselves, because I think it would be really funny. The problem is, I would do it because I would be so amused by a Sparky action figure; there would be no way that we would do anything more than barely break even. But no one would understand that; everyone would think that I’d sold out or something. Unfortunately that’s just the type of response that you get from that sort of thing. But I think it would be great fun to have a Sparky action figure; you know, it could come with a little Blinky or God-knows-what accessories. We’ve got a few t-shirts and things because people ask for that stuff—
Smokebox: Crass commercialism?
Tomorrow: Yeah, the "Crass Commercialism" section of the website. But the way I make my living is by drawing cartoons and selling them to newspapers. I make maybe a couple of hundred dollars a year on top of that from the t-shirts and what have you; it’s something that I do for fun. I enjoy designing the product and seeing it printed, and some people ask for it and some people want it, but it’s not something that I make a lot of money on, and it’s not a big priority for me.
Smokebox: I checked out the animated stuff on the web for the first time this week, and it’s always kind of disconcerting for me to actually hear the characters’ voices; I’m used to providing my own voices in my head as I read the strip. Is that an agonizing decision? Do you have to sit there listening to hundreds of voices before you get it right?
Tomorrow: Some of them…there’s a whole team working on the animation, I’m overseeing it, but you have to understand that the focus of my daily life is the print cartoon that I’m doing; that’s what I’m putting most of my energy into, so what’s hard for me is when something slips by–some design element that’s not something I would have chosen, or a voice that I don’t think is right–but I simply don’t have time to sit in on every recording session, or to oversee every aspect. I look at character design, and I co-write the scripts, although Harold Moss does a great deal of this. I’d say he does the majority of it right now; it’s a lot of back-and-forth, but he’s usually the one who sits down and pounds out the final script, and then I go over that. So it’s probably about a 60/40 kind of thing. He’s taking this thing and bringing a lot of his own input to it, which is fine; we’re very much in line in terms of what direction this thing should go, so that part’s usually okay. But then there will always be somebody’s voice that just makes me cringe; I think "No, no, they just did that all wrong, don’t you get it? Don’t you hear that? Don’t you hear how wrong that is?" But because it’s an internet thing and there’s no budget and we’re working on a tight deadline, a lot of the time I have to let it go anyway.
I’m a control freak and it’s been a hard transition for me to be involved in such a heavily collaborative process, but I can’t emphasize strongly enough that I’m very, very happy with the work we’re doing. Harold’s animation team deserves all the praise I can heap upon them. We are very fortunate to have some really great people working on this. The voice of Sparky is done by my friend Bob Harris, who used to have a radio show on Working Assets Radio, and he just has the right voice for Sparky; he just captured what I wanted to capture with Sparky. And the actress who does Blinky’s voice, she just steals the show, and I’m very happy with that. The main characters I’m very happy with, but a lot of the extras that they cycle through I’m not always thrilled with.
Smokebox: How has your technique evolved over the years? I notice that now your color work is just incredibly sharp and precise, and the backgrounds are different; the black-and-white work that you started out with in the eighties and nineties really set you apart. Exactly how do you produce the strip?
Tomorrow: When I started out, and for most of the time I’ve been doing this, I worked with a combination of Xerox collage and pen and ink; I was working on a drawing board, I was copying images and repainting them and redrawing them and drawing in backgrounds and what have you. How it changed was, I went over to the dark side and I finally made the move to Photoshop; I waited a very very long time to do this. But I finally decided I had better enter the 20th century, even though it was the 21st before I was doing it [laughs]. It just really changed everything, it really opened up all kinds of possibilities for me. Before, when I did color work, I usually had to spec out colors and just pray that whoever was doing the colors on their own computer system got it right. Now I’m able to do it myself. I’m not a terrific artist by any means, but I think I have a pretty good color sense, and the fact that I can see it on the screen and play with it and not have to guess at it really made all the difference.
Smokebox: What type of art background do you have? Any formal training?
Tomorrow: Not really. Just a little bit of fairly useless liberal arts art training, but for the most part, I guess I’m just self-taught.
( tom tomorrow interview -- conclusion)
