It’s a tough time to be a cartoonist these days. Magazines started dropping cartoons from their pages years ago. Daily newspapers (remember them?) are now dropping whole pages of comic strips. They’re also doing away with their salaried editorial cartoonists. Now the evolving economy has come for the alternative weeklies.

With a name like Tom Tomorrow, you’d expect him to fight aliens with a ray gun in some old Mort Weisinger DC comic from the 1950s. Instead, Mr. Tomorrow fights society’s evils with something better, a Wacom tablet and Photoshop and a wicked sense of humor. Now the erstwhile Mr. Tomorrow could use a hand.

According to his blog, which has been confirmed by other sources, the Village Voice Media conglomerate has been hit just as hard by our collapsing economy as other newspapers and magazines. They’ve responded by dropping all the syndicated cartoons from their various alt-weeklies. This includes the loss of This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow.

For now, the Dallas Observer, New Times Ft. Lauderdale, Houston Press, LA Weekly, Minneapolis City Pages, Nashville Scene, OC Weekly, Pitch Weekly, Seattle Weekly, Denver Westword and the Village Voice in New York will all be cartoonless.

If you’re a fan of Tom Tomorrow’s and you live in one of the above cities and you’d like to do him and his fellow cartoonists (guys like Max Cannon, Ruben Bolling, Lloyd Dangle to name a few) a solid, take the time to write a nice, well-reasoned letter to the editor and ask her to reconsider the decision and bring back the cartoons. Yeah, there are lots of great cartoons on the internet, and Tom Tomorrow and his cartoon pals may not be to your political taste, but as long as there are newspapers there should be cartoons in them. They’re one of the most popular features they have. I think the people in charge sometimes forget that.
(Artwork ©2008 Tom Tomorrow)