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Dan Perkins Before He Was Tom Tomorrow

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D. D. Degg Published: December 12, 2025 Updated: December 12, 2025 1 minute 1 comment

Before there was cartoonist Tom Tomorrow there was cartoonist Dan Perkins.

“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.”

Kembrew McLeod for Little Village profiles the early Dan Perkins.

“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.”

“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.

The article does follow “Tom Tomorrow” into the beginning of This Modern World and to the present where like many cartoonists he depends on the kindness of fans:

“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.”

As for his hometown Little Village alternative newspaper:

“I still have a tangible connection to Iowa City, because it still runs in Little Village,” Perkins said.