Penguin Soup For The Soul

Back in the Watergate era, the political cartoon was reinvented by Oliphant, MacNelly, and Toles, who replaced the tired donkeys, elephants, and Uncle Sams with a graphic wit both more subtle and more slapstick. Now, Tom Tomorrow (a.k.a. Dan Perkins) has reinvented it again in Penguin Soup For The Soul, using a strip format with lots of dialogue that parodies the earnest, robotically cheerful ads and public-service messages of the 1950s. Like all good satirists, Perkins is an indiscriminately subversive individualist, and the work assembled here (his fourth collection) does a seriously funny job of taking on the derangements of consumer culture and the high pretensions of political lowlifes. A