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Tom Tomorrow Here's something you didn't know about me, Top5 owner Chris White: Of all the comic strips in the world, my absolute favorite is This Modern World, written by Tom Tomorrow. The strip has a much-deserved reputation as one of the most incisive political cartoons anywhere, simply because it questions things that most people take for granted. Tom Tomorrow -- or Dan Perkins, as he is known in a parallel universe -- plays no favorites, skewering both the left and the right and everything in between, gleefully holding politicians up to the bright light of scrutiny. There's not a hypocrite anywhere who has avoided ending up at the business end of Dan's pen. The fact that these vicious teeth are hidden behind an innocent retro look only adds to the fun of the strip. Few people realize that the Starr I are slam of Ken Starr, which has become ubiquitous on the Internet, was written by Tomorrow and made its debut in This Modern World. Tom Tomorrow excels in ruffling feathers -- within four months, This Modern World was dumped by two major publications (including U.S. News & World Report) after pissing off both publishers and readers. The very first strip Tomorrow handed in to U.S. News & World Report was a send-up of The McLaughlin Group -- which just happens to have as a regular panelist U.S. News Publisher Mort Zuckerman. The honeymoon was over before it began: That first strip was axed, and six months later the entire cartoon was sent packing. Tomorrow commented, "[The magazine's readers] wrote in all these letters complaining that I was biased, as if a political cartoon should be anything but one man's biases and opinions. That's the whole point of it." Tomorrow was also in contention for a spot in Brill's Content, until he sent them a sample strip linking media ownership to journalistic bias. Nevertheless, This Modern World appears weekly in more than 100 papers. Tom Tomorrow has a development deal with Saturday Night Live and has four paperback collections of his strips in bookstores, including his latest, Penguin Soup for the Soul. In 1998, Tomorrow won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for outstanding reporting on the problems of the disadvantaged. He has been praised by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who described Tom Tomorrow as "the wry voice of American common sense, humor and decency." Much more info on This Modern World and Tom Tomorrow can be found online at www.thismodernworld.com, and the latest weekly installment of the strip is always available at Salon Magazine. © Copyright 1994-2010.  All rights reserved. TopFive.com and The Top 5 List are owned by Chris White. Absolutely no publishing or reprinting without prior consent.