This Modern World debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. While it often ridicules those in power, the strip also focuses on the average American's support for contemporary leaders and their policies, as well as the popular media's role in shaping public perception.
In addition to any politicians and celebrities depicted, the strip has several recurring characters:
- A sunglasses-wearing penguin named "Sparky" and his Boston Terrier friend "Blinky";
- "Biff," a generic conservative often used by Sparky as a foil;
- "Conservative Jones," a boy detective whose deductive reasoning satirizes the logic of conservative news analysts and politicians;
- The tentacle-waving Aliens of Planet Glox;
- The "Small Cute Dog," who was accidentally elected president on "Parallel Earth," and whose subsequent actions mirrored those of President George W. Bush.
Read more about this topic: Tom Tomorrow
Famous quotes containing the word modern:
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)