Just read it in today's NY Times. Not actually out of work, but Village Voice Media, which syndicated his cartoon dropped all syndicated cartoons, which meant that Tom Tomorrow lost 12 newspapers. Apparently, mothership Village Voice recently re-picked up This Modern World, but the other newspapers are still up in the air.
He did get a break when Pearl Jam asked him to draw their album cover, however:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/arts/music/08pearl.htmlBad Luck Turns Good: That’s Rock ’n’ Roll
By BEN SISARIO
Published: September 7, 2009
Dan Perkins, who writes and draws the political cartoon “This Modern World” under the name Tom Tomorrow, got some bad news in January.
Village Voice Media, the chain of alternative weekly newspapers, was dropping all syndicated cartoons as a cost-cutting measure, and Mr. Perkins lost 12 papers at once, a major blow to his income. He called his friend Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, whom he had met at a Ralph Nader campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in 2000. Maybe, Mr. Perkins said he hoped, he might get a gig designing a Pearl Jam concert poster.
...
Within weeks he was working on the cover for Pearl Jam’s latest album, “Backspacer,” which will be released on Sept. 20. It is Mr. Perkins’s first album cover, and the first time that Pearl Jam has gone outside its circle to find a cover artist. Both parties also realized that they had been brought together partly as a result of the transformations of their fields by new media, since the Internet has wreaked the same havoc on newspapers as it has on the music industry.
“It used to be real simple,” Mr. Vedder explained. “Dan writes a strip, it gets in the paper, people read it, Dan gets paid. That’s how we felt too: make records, people buy them at a record store, we tour, there you go. It’s not that simple anymore.”
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