This Modern World is a weekly satirical comic strip by cartoonist and political commentator Tom Tomorrow (real name Dan Perkins) that covers current events from a left-wing point of view.

Published continuously for more than 30 years, This Modern World appears regularly in more than 80 newspapers across the United States and Canada as of 2015,[1] as well as in The Nation,[2] The Nib,[3] Truthout,[4] and the Daily Kos.

[9][10] While This Modern World 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.

The series has been through several incarnations through the years, the first of which appeared in the Suburban High Life comic books published by Slave Labor in the late 1980s.

Initially, the strip was almost completely composed of actual vintage clip art and magazine cutouts, assembled collage-style and often manipulated and retouched.

[citation needed] The '50s theme extends to the typically verbose dialogue of the strip's human characters, which is often bubbly, over-enthusiastic, and naïve.

[12] He adopted the subject matter of the consumer culture and the drudgery of work, a theme shared by the magazine, and entitled his comic strip This Modern World.

Perkins thereby lost twelve client papers in cities, including Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, and Seattle,[15] prompting his friend Eddie Vedder to post an open letter on the Pearl Jam website in support of the cartoonist.

Biff often appears alone with Sparky, expressing a naive conservative opinion which invariably prompts an exasperated liberal rebuttal from the penguin.

I.H.O.T.F.M.-Man is an ardent defender of Adam Smith's invisible hand metaphor, and usually intervenes in situations where the purity of free market economics is in jeopardy.

In others, the inhabitants of Parallel Earth have made sensible political choices, in contrast to the people of our own world (but wear odd, brightly-colored clothing featuring polka dots).

From 2000 to 2001, an animated This Modern World series was produced by Flickerlab for Mondo Media, with Bob Harris as the voice of Sparky.

[17] The show was the top-billed attraction in Mondo Media's lineup of mini-shows; each episode was approximately five minutes long.