Hey! Tom Tomorrow's newest compilation is hot off the presses -- and available exclusively at TopatoCo (where you'll also find a variety of fine t-shirts and other merchandise)! Featuring the last two years of TMW cartoons in full, glorious color, an introduction by Eddie Vedder, and extensive annotation! Makes a great War on Christmas gift!

ALSO: please consider joining SPARKY'S LIST!

NRA debate tips.

The East Bay Express is dropping TMW this week, due to the usual budgetary reasons, which is a shame — they were one of the few papers I actually managed to add over the past couple of years. But these things happen — I’m grateful to them for trying to make it work for as long as they did.

However, it serves as a gentle reminder of the vicissitudes of print. As I wrote last spring:

As you may have heard, the newspaper industry has been undergoing some difficulties of late. As regular readers of this blog are aware, too many altweeklies have decided to save literally tens of dollars a week by cutting their most popular feature — the comics.

Thanks to the internet, my cartoons are more widely read than I could have ever imagined possible, when I started out twenty or so years ago. But as my readership expands exponentially, my income remains in steady decline. I’m no economist, but that doesn’t seem sustainable to me.

I’m still fortunate enough to have a substantial number of clients both in print and online, for which I am profoundly grateful — but the reality is that the world is changing rapidly, and we all need to keep figuring out different ways to adapt.

So I’ve decided to add a new component to the overall Tomorrowco strategy for survival, and offer my own email subscription service which — as previously noted — I’m calling SPARKY’S LIST. I didn’t want to ask for charity — I’ve always been somewhat uncomfortable even having that donations button on the blog. Instead, I wanted to offer something of value to TMW’s most devoted readers — the opportunity to see the cartoon several days before it appears online or in print, as well as the convenience of having it delivered directly to your inbox. If you’re one of those people who can never remember where you left your keys or what day TMW appears on what website, this is the answer for you. About the cartoon, I mean. I can’t help you with your keys.

Think of it as a Kickstarter project to sustain something that already exists, and that you would like to see continue.

(As it’s developed, the weekly email I send out usually contains substantial commentary and additional links relating to each week’s cartoon, as well as any other random stuff I might be thinking about. There have been some giveaways, and members were eligible for a discount on my new book and the plush Sparky at TopatoCo.)

If you enjoy the work I do, please consider signing up. Andrew Sullivan recently raised close to a million dollars for his blogging — the merest fraction of that would go a long way toward supporting This Modern World.

with another fun-filled excursion into the zany world of topical political satire. This week: debating the coin.

Always crashing in the same car.

This is the cartoon I had originally planned for this week, before news of the Newtown atrocities broke. With the Times reporting the possibility of a deal in the works that includes Social Security, I thought I’d go ahead and get this one out there.

Click here for larger.

Please be sure to visit the fabulous online emporium for your last-minute War on Christmas shopping!

Here.

Every time one of these atrocities has occurred, since the cartoon below first ran in January of 2011, readers have written to suggest that I rerun it with a blank line replacing the name of the town. And in fact, I seriously considered it this time, as a way of driving home the sheer numbing repetition of these massacres. But then I realized I wanted to take the idea a little further than that, so this is where I ended up, with a sort of sequel to the last one.

Somebody on Twitter asked for a link to this one, easier to just repost.

A couple of people have asked me to make gift subscriptions to the List available, so here you go. Because it will involve an extra layer of administrative oversight, I’m setting them up as year-long subscriptions at $20. Because you need something to put under the tree, I’ve created a gift certificate you can download here and print out.

NOTE: be SURE to fill out the box below with the recipient’s email. If I don’t have that info when processing the order, I will issue a refund.

ALSO PLEASE NOTE: this box is ONLY for the email address! I put this together on short notice and am not set up to pass along any messages to your gift’s recipient. They will be added to the list after Christmas, but the rest is entirely up to you.

Gift sub recipient email: